The first day hurts your feet.
Before it starts, you’ll spend days putting your room back together. Every year you’ll take it apart in case it is the year your room gets repainted. You’ll come back mid-August to find out that it is not that year. So you’ll spend hours putting things back together so your room will function well and so learning can happen smoothly and efficiently. You’ll put bulletin boards up and revamp your posters and throw some out. In some organized manner, you’ll try to hang your diplomas with the art work that was gifted to you. Somewhere during this time, you’ll spend hours and hours in meetings where you re-learn the rules for your school. “Coats can be worn outside, but not in the hallways and not in classrooms so students will receive a warning/stern look/citation/let’s debate this and figure it out.”
You’ll put your ideas together and think about the tone you want to set for the year. And then before you’re ready, they’ll all arrive. All 130+ of them. They’ll come in a whirlwind. You’ll spend the day managing your energy and managing their expectations. You can’t let them expect to walk all over you and you can’t let them expect you’ll hurt them. You will do all you can all day to let them know they are safe and smart and that they can do hard work. Big groups of them will come in and out all day and you’ll try not to butcher their names and you’ll hope to remember them once they move from that one spot where you know what to call them. You’ll work to let them know that you’re in charge but that you want them to be in charge too. You’ll learn the heart-breaking things about their lives from the casual ways that kids mention them. And you’ll blink it away and tell them how reading/writing/listening/literature/technology/speaking/vocabulary will save them. You’ll mean it because it does save lives and because you have such great, great hopes for theirs.
So by the end of it, your feet will hurt.
msellendorr 