Friday closed the books on my first first week of school (my spelling/grammar check is having spasms right now) … it was my first foray into welcoming students in the fall. “How did it go?” you ask. Frankly, I could not be happier with the overall finished product. There were a few hiccups and bumps along the way, but I stuck the landing as I was propelled into Friday.
One of the biggest, and most controversial, changes this year is a greatly reduced lunch and recess time over the noon hour. Typically, the elementary lunch time period has extended from 11:30 – 12:00. After that, we all enjoyed a breather of another 30 minutes for outdoor recess (unless, of course, the thermometer reads -70 degrees). Our new superintendent, in conjunction with the elementary principal, decreed that a full hour spent eating and exercising was tomfoolery (is that a great word, or what? I’m not even sure what it means, but it just rolls right off the tongue). Back to said school scandal…
So the edict came down that a full twenty minutes was to be shaved off our indulgent noon hour. Only twenty minutes would be allotted to get the entire elementary through the lunch line, and then a mere twenty minutes for recess. We teachers were assured that this was more than enough adequate time to meet the dietary and exercise needs of our little charges. In fact, we were chided that it should really take no longer than seven minutes to push the wee lads and lasses through the line. Where was THAT number plucked from? And furthermore, how are we stressed, overworked, exhausted teachers supposed to renew in only 40 minutes? You can barely sip a latte and take a nap in that amount of time. I mean, C’MON! We have rights, after all!
I’ve tried to get the kids there punctually, I really have. But somehow, second grade always seems to beat us. We had originally been told to leave our classrooms at 11:30 sharp. But that didn’t seem to be doing the trick. By the time we stopped at the restrooms to quickly wash our hands, plowed through the line (some of it self-serve. “Here kids, I’ll just pour the pudding out of the giant pot in a steady stream and you shove your tray under the flow. It’ll save time!”) So now the new proclamation was, be IN the lunchroom at 11:30, on the dot. “Seven minutes, people. Seven minutes.” The whole process has the feel of working cattle. For you city slickers, that means prodding the bovines through chutes and then assembly-line doing things like, vaccinating, attaching ear tags or branding, etc. It’s usually a very streamlined process and the cattle get pushed through in very short order. That’s exactly how I feel once the clock hits 11:25. It’s like a human version of the Running of the Bulls. Don’t you dare get in our way! We are on our way to LUNCH and we WILL knock you down, if need be (don’t think we won’t...).
Now that I have the whining out of the way, I have to say in all fairness, 30 minutes was way too long for lunch. My kids usually had their lunches half digested in about 11 minutes and then would be forced to sit there watching the clock drag itself to the magic hour of noon and glorious recess. Now the timing is perfect for eating and being able to go right outdoors. That will change, of course, when winter hits and my students have to put nine layers of additional clothing on their bodies. I anticipate that until they get things down to a science, recess will be reduced to roughly 45 seconds for most of them.
About mid-week, I had a horrifying mistake occur. Our school’s system of notifying teachers of where students are to go after school suffered a breakdown. Wait, did I use the word SYSTEM? Ha! My bad. There IS no system. Most of the time, the little darlings simply tell me what they have been commanded to do after school on any given day. Many times they forget where they’re supposed to go or what they are supposed to do, and then said teacher must run up to the office (no cell signal in my room, remember) and try to track down a parent in order to get the child to his or her proper destination. It’s a scary combination of recall, luck, and parent/guardians answering their phone.
Such was a scenario this week. First thing that particular morning, Student A informs me he is supposed to go to the babysitter’s house instead of riding the bus. Wonderful and duly noted. After the “get on the bus” bell sounded at the end of the day, he obediently stayed and waited for the second bell that signals the in-town kids may leave. I am busy wiping down tables and answering questions from the two still in my care when the intercom crackles to life. “Mrs. Dahl?” I’ve never had opportunity to talk to the darn box on the wall by the clock. I was a little self-conscious about for some reason. “Yes?” “Mrs. Dahl,” the faceless voice continued. “Is ___________ still in the room?” Yes, as a matter of fact he was. “Mrs. Dahl, is he supposed to ride the bus? The bus is waiting for him. Can you send him right up?” I erroneously made the near fatal mistake of second guessing his instructions and my gut instinct. I wrongly assumed that contradictory orders had been delivered to the nerve center of the building, The Office. The place that students feared and teachers either marched on, like Washington D.C., or avoided altogether.
I looked at Student A and he looked at me, and without a word he picked up his backpack and ran up the stairs. A couple of hours later, the secretary came to me with a white face and look of horror. “I just got a call. He was NOT supposed to ride the bus. There was nobody home and the driver just dropped him off not knowing that. He was home alone (this would be great title for an iconic Christmas movie) for quite a long time!” I could feel my eyes bulging out of their sockets and my right hand instinctively flew up to cover my mouth (I think to stifle the scream that was coming). Did he die? No, thank the good Lord. Not even maimed or emotionally traumatized. His mother told me the next day (as I was kissing her feet and stumbling over an apology), that when someone finally showed up, he was happily riding his bike around their farm. His parents were VERY gracious about it. I WILL make a point of being SURE next time. A SYSTEM for first grade is in the works.
One of my favorite things about this first week was the institution of our 24-Hour Words. I got the idea from a study I had read based on the literacy research of an Australian teacher in the bush. Her claim was that you can engage children in literacy if you can get them to take ownership of language. To that end, on Wednesday I explained my plan to my students and had them choose a word that would be THEIR word for 24 hours. Once they had chosen a word (ANY word, just had to be school appropriate), I wrote the word on an index card and handed it to them. They were to look at the word, think about the word, try to learn how to spell the word, sleep with the word, and OWN the word until the next morning when they would transcribe another word to me. I broke into the widest grin the next day when those index cards showed up wrinkled and stained. They had taken me at my word and kept those words with them the entire time. Most could spell their word and all knew the meaning. This will become a first grade tradition, I am confident.
As the week wound down to a sliding end, I received a mobile upload from my son, a first year dental student. It was a picture of a giant model of a mouth and he had added text that proudly informed me he had made his very first tooth replacement out of wax. Now, you might find that to be not at all exciting, but I looked at that picture of the grinning, floating set of faceless teeth, and I was proud as punch. A mother doesn’t care if the handiwork is finger painting, a touchdown on a 9-man team, or a wax tooth. When our children shine, we beam. I was beaming.
As in most schools, I’m sure, Friday afternoons are just a little different from the rest of the week. They are really not supposed to be. They are a day, just like any of the other four, but the mood and timbre is just a hair more relaxed. I chose Fridays to get in a weekly art lesson. I want to make an important distinction here. Many teachers erroneously think that CRAFTS and ART are the same thing. They are not. Gluing beads on a foam frame that says School is Cool is not art. That is a no-brainer craft that will only be meaningful to that child’s sappy mother. I’m not saying I haven’t done those sorts of crafts in class – ‘cuz I certainly have. Mother’s EXPECT them, for crying out loud. But true art is learning about line, light, dimension, and color, among other things.
To that end, I chose to carry the tub of watercolor paints outside in order to make art come alive through real-world experience. The kids were a little unsure what to think of having art OUTSIDE. It was both weird and wonderful they felt. I concurred. I was a little giddy with myself. It should be noted here that I am a quasi-hippie. Not the drug-experimenting, sexual revolution sort of hippie, but the kind that finds great personal satisfaction with all things nature-related. It feeds my very soul to be outdoors on a balmy day or to see an amazing sunrise. I attempt to capture the essence of those miraculous things with my camera or with various forms of art. Like I said – quasi-hippie.
I laid out the paints, made sure brushes were passed around, filled bowls with water (cups would tip too easily), handed out plain, white construction paper and told the kids to start painting. They looked stymied. “Paint… what?,” one brave soul asked. “Look around you and choose something you see that you like. Then paint it.” “Paint anything we see, Mrs. Dahl?” “Anything at all,” was my answer. I could see excitement on their faces. They had never thought about capturing something in their line of vision and recreating it on a page. Pretty soon I heard water sloshing around in bowls and the bubbling conversations of engaged, happy children. “Hey, did you know when you mix red and blue it makes purple?,” I overheard my little dinosaur-lover announce. They were rushing forward towards the outer limits of true art discovery.
And so, as the day closed on the last day of the first week, we sat on the playground in the warm sun and talked about a famous artist named Claude Monet who loved to paint what he saw in nature and even painted the same scene at different times of day in order to capture it in different light. And I felt a soft smile spread across my face as water sloshed and brushes stroked in bold line, and children ran to me for more paper in order to paint another picture. I knew Claude would be pleased and surely was hovering close by smiling in approval.
My first first week was wonderful and exhausting and mostly successful. I made some mistakes and learned a few lessons the hard way, but I also felt more in control as a teacher than I ever have. I saw, felt, and reveled in substantial learning from my students. This is what I trained for. It’s all a gigantic waste of time if kids aren’t learning, right? Week Two is fast approaching and I still need to tweak lesson plans, but I am eagerly anticipating it. This teaching thing is addictive. I gotta’ tell ‘ya, I’m hooked. I know it is early in my career, but if enjoyment level is any indication, then I made the right career choice. I think if a person is still smiling at the end of the day, then they are doing what they were born to do.
Still smiling….
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