I taught today, or perhaps maybe I should say that I co-taught today. It was the first full day of school for everyone at Edison Middle School. I got there around 8 o'clock, and found a note from Laura saying that she might be in late because she had to deliver her dog to the vet. The classroom was quiet. Driving in I saw this orange morning light over the hills behind the school, and there was something peaceful and serene about the whole thing. It was a very beautiful morning. And sitting in the classroom I was reminded of the seasonal shift--a kind of tectonic motion from one state of being to another--from summer to the school year.
Around 8:45 the kids were released--like water from a dam--into the hallways, and the spaces were saturated with noise. The jostling, the bustling, the navigating space, the celebratory hellos and the awkward questions, the opening and slamming of lockers, the shrieks of girls reunited with prized friends, separated by summer, the boys crashing into each other, making a game of the space, their bodies. It's a joyous ruckus, a cataclysm of bodies moving through and resisting the closed space.
I stood in the hallway with Laura, guiding children to and fro. I saw a few students who I met yesterday and some of them said cautious hellos. By about 9 o'clock most of them were in the room. Laura went to assist a child with their locker, and I went back to the classroom, where almost 40 children sat in desks, waiting for something to happen.
I wish I could remember them all. When I taught at a small private school, each class would have a distinct flavor, with only 10-16 kids it was easier to get that taste early on. But with so many children, th scale of the operation makes such fine distinctions a challenge. I can say this: the first three periods (before lunch) were much more orderly and were lacking almost entirely in any negativity. Periods four and five (after lunch) were less orderly, and there was a palpable challenging boy energy. One child kicked things off by announcing to Laura that he loved tacos. Later he said that he liked her pajamas; she replied that they weren't pajamas (he retorted, half under his breath, that he knew that) but that she was happy he liked them.
I would not have worn to school on the first day the pants that Laura wore; they were very much like pajamas, but it was clear the boy was trying to get under her skin. She had to snap at him later.
A few things of note. We use this amplification system. We wear these little microphones around our necks, and our voices are piped in through the ceiling. It is a strange thing, to hear one's voice projected so loudly, and I don't like the message that it sends: that the teacher's voice is the loudest and, therefore, the most important. So I had to adjust to that. The mics were complicated by the fact that only one of them could be on at the same time, so we had to keep turning them on and off, which, in its own way, perhaps, modeled the whole only-one-person-speaks-at-a-time thing.
We basically did get-to-know-you exercises and got a brief writing sample from them. I told them two things about me: that I love teaching and hate middle school. Most of them seemed to respond to that second thing. Each kid said their name and then one thing they were interested in. I walked the aisles, making eye contact with each kid and sort of repeating back to them what they heard. I made a point to say every kids name and to reflect back to each of them what I had heard. What they are interested wasn't terribly interesting to me. They said they liked sports or hunting or music or art. A few of them said things that were fairly specific. One child plays the oboe; another likes jazz guitar; another likes platypi.
Laura took roll in each class. I had a few cringing moments when it came to her pronunciation of their names. She butchered quite a few of them, and, perhaps because she was nervous about that, she overcompensated. I'm thinking of a kind named Dre, whose name was written as such in the roster, and she called him Dree, and everyone laughed, and he corrected her politely, and then she butchered his last night, and he corrected her politely on that one, and then she called him Dree again, and he kind of gave up. The thing that made me cringe the most was that it was usually the brown children in the room whose names she butchered the most, and she kept talking about how she didn't speak Spanish and sort of drew this spotlight in closely on them.
I took notes about each kid, the names they liked to be called. It dawns on me now, writing this, that most of today was about getting to know the kids names. I think I probably have about 30 or so down. I caught myself in class, when I was doing the teaching, scanning the room, looking at kids, trying to get the names.
I think the overwhelming message they get from Laura is that they need to behave and play by the rules. I think the overwhelming message they got from me is that I'm interested in getting to know them. I think in the aggregate there was a kind of balance between order and discovery, but I'm sensing this ying-yang thing developing between us.
Not that there is tension. There isn't. We had a good time in the room together; we shared space pretty well. I left the building today tired but happy. It's going to be a good year.
Oh. And the principal stopped in on our 5th period class and watched us doing the writing sample. It made me self-conscious for about 12 seconds, and then I tried to forget that he was there. After all he was just another adult in the room, and I'm not really beholden to him in any way. Besides, I was doing pretty good work.
I'm going to remember that Serena lit up when I told her that I remembered she didn't like to be compared to her sister; that Brynne wanted to write about both of her parents houses; that Matthias lit up when I remembered his name and told him that; that Glenda read her entire writing sample to me before handing it in and seemed proud of what she had written; that Ralph wrote about what the trees looked like on the street where he often rode his bicycles.
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