First Day Worries

It was the first day of school. My bike had been stolen outside the zendo that morning and this time it was my whole bike. All that was left was the lock and the helmet (they cut through the cable and lock). When the person who often arrives at the zendo at the same time as me each morning saw this he asked, “Where’s your bike?”

I kind of laughed and said, “It looks like it was stolen.”

He shook his head in sympathy and immediately offered to give me a ride home. But I was so worried  about it being the first day and getting home quickly, I foolishly thought it would be faster to walk, so I declined his generous offer.

I cursed myself about this decision as I schlepped up the hill in my Ugg boots. But my schlepping must have been fast enough because once I got home and did my trick of getting dressed while my oatmeal cooked, I ended up getting to school at a reasonable time.

Leading up to the first day, I had been going back and forth between feeling like I needed to be worried and feeling totally fine about the first week of school. Actually, I shouldn’t say that I felt totally fine about the first week of school, because that wasn’t it. What would happen is that I would start to get worried that I wasn’t prepared beyond the first day. (Normally I have the first week totally planned out on the Friday before school starts but I hadn’t done that at all). When I started to think about this, I freaked out, because I felt unprepared. But then, when I tried to plan for the week, it felt really silly. I’d imagine what we’d be doing on Wednesday but then I knew that I couldn’t really plan for Wednesday because I didn’t know what was going to happen on Wednesday. It just seemed useless to do it since I didn’t know what Wednesday would be like until I got there.

I finally found a compromise for this by having everything planned out and ready for the first day and then using any other time I had to make photocopies for stuff I would need for the rest of the week. In that way, I felt like I was ready to respond to what came up in the rest of the week (having the physical things there if I needed them) but that I wasn’t planning for something that I didn’t know anything about.

It was still scary to do this and it felt worse as I watched other teachers look totally ready for their week. I also worried that now was the only time I would ever have to get this stuff done. Once the kids came and school started, my afternoons would be filled with cleaning up from the day, getting ready for the next day, and attending meetings, looking over kids’ work, etc. But every time I tried to deal with this by doing things that weren’t needed right now, it just felt really useless and a waste of my time. A couple of times I did it anyway but it felt like I was just going through the motions.

So when I got there that morning, I focused on just setting up the room for the day: I walked myself through what I would say for each lesson and then planned everything based on one goal: that the kids would leave at the end of the day feeling happy about school. I made sure their names were somewhere in the classroom, made time to give them a tour of the room and the school, made sure we went over the fire drill, and then planned activities that I thought would make them relax and start to get to know each other.

And it worked. We made it through the day and it happened the way it always happens: we run out of time because everything takes so long the first day so all the stuff I had prepared ahead of time wasn’t needed anyway. And after school, and in the following days, I got emails and comments from parents saying how much their child liked school, felt good about third grade, and was happy.

I have to admit that it's easy to do this right now: to only focus on the kids being happy and enjoying school. I'm pretty sure that as the year progresses and I see kids not getting the lesson or falling behind in their math facts or reading level that I'm not going to be so worried about their happiness and push instead for some suffering to make sure that they learn this stuff...