With the close of last school year, I completed my 30th campaign in education. Each of those years has been filled with joy and sorrow, challenges and successes, ups and downs and a ton of stories worth sharing. My (True) Life in Education Thus Far will detail 30 or so of those stories. I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed living (most) of them!
THE FIRST DAY
August 10, 2022
Beginning a school year when the year has already started is something to be avoided. Doing that in your first year of teaching is a truly terrible idea. Starting mid-year is very much like trying to board a moving train, you can do it, but it is going to hurt.
I began my first teaching position at Bishop McNamara High School on a Monday in October replacing a teacher who, according to the students I was inheriting, had a “nervous breakdown.”
I never found out if mental stress was actually the reason my predecessor departed and the reasons for her leaving the school were immaterial at any rate. I had a teaching job. I had students. I had my own classroom.
I was terrified.
I have related the story of my first day as a teacher on numerous occasions. In truth, it is not the story of my first day, it is the story of one incident that took place on my first day, an incident that shaped the totality of my first year.
I remember being in the classroom right before first period, reviewing the seating chart provided me, trying to learn names.
The students began to arrive. They were seniors, some of them surely 18 already and only 4 years my junior. I was very conscious of that fact.
I do not know what they were thinking, but I imagined they thought they had run one teacher out, they could take care of this new one, too.
I was 22 and nervous. I was also six foot three. I have learned to never underestimate that gift.
Class started. I called the roll. I introduced myself. I moved into the lesson. Interesting and, perhaps, instructive to me that I do not recall the content from that day. I walked to the chalk board and caught some motion out of the corner of my eye.
A student had slipped out of her desk. She had fainted in her seat and crumpled to the floor.
No kidding.
She was out. Unconscious. And I was panicked.
I double and triple clutched for what felt like an eternity and then (please remember this was 1994) I had a male student pick the young woman up and he and I walked with her to the Main Office. I did not know if we had a nurse.
Oh the liability…
When I returned to the classroom, the students were messing around, joking and laughing with abandon because, you know, kids! I entered the classroom and lost it. I raised my voice. I yelled at them. I told them how I did not know them but how disappointed I was. Who knew at that point if their classmate was going to be okay? What were they thinking?
The room got very quiet and still. I went on with the lesson.
Did my outburst help the students respect me? I do not know. I do know that I never raised my voice with that class again for the rest of the year. Maybe it did.
What malady affected that young lady is lost in my memory. The names of the students in that class are as well. But the incident is indelible.
