I have recently met 159 people. Teenagers, though they are certainly people too. Maybe even more people than we assume in terms of their digestion and output upon the cultures of the world–mighty yet without perhaps the ability to vote or to drive.
These teenagers have, through no real work of mine, been assigned to my classroom for more than 180 days of English learning.
The experience of the new school year–a new set of teachers or even a new school–is ingrained in tons of beginning-of-school-year sequences in our entertainment. It is exciting to be sure, wrapped in a sort of tension of newness and nextness.
From the perspective of a teacher, I’m trying to regain my footing, to inhabit the mind of a teenager so I can plan the year better than all the last years. This is difficult and requires extreme amounts of empathy, some derived by experience, some by anthropologic study, and some by cultural cues. Despite all of this, I am yet far removed from the teenage identity. It is an identity I grow further and further from every year even though I spend more than half of the year working with teenagers.
For me, weirdly enough, the opening days of the year can be harrowing. Not in the sense that I am worried about my capabilities or the year itself. It’s in the sense of having a lot of people over for dinner, you’re the chef, and all the delivery services, restaurants, and grocery stores have closed for the night. It is your culinary skills or nothing.
I am consciously aware that I am one of seven teachers a student sees that is also doing a get-to-know-you activity. Also, getting 28 people “on board,” so to speak, with you as a teacher is a pretty daunting task, one that needs to be deferred in my mind to some future date.
Furthermore, I’m terrible with names. Every year, I vow to learn everyone’s names in the first week, and then the business of the year contends for my attention, winning handedly.
Lastly, I myself, as a student, always thought that the beginning days of school were quite boring. Learning syllabi, or even just doing similar get-to-know-you activities, was never my cup of tea. My hackles were raised even before I entered that classroom.
You’d think that this criticism of the first day of school would compel a solid and creative solution to the problem, but I didn’t get into teaching to be a conductor of all of the things the first days of school are. I am not an event planner, a skillset I am constantly feeling guilty of lacking. So many great teachers possess this quality and are quick to create solid classroom communities.
In short, this time of year is my kryptonite.
Having been a student who was constantly worried about fitting in–that whole way one tries to impress and convince new people to extend their friendship group to one other person (I moved a lot while growing up)–means I am very cognizant of what can be boring. It’s a great barometer and a terrible curse.
Like any teacher, I have certain specialities, things that I can get away with in my classroom. One of these things is a certain style of dry comedy. I can say things like, “Well, I hope everyone has a pretty moderately enjoyable weekend.” Or, “Only monsters steal Sharpies.” These comments fit my persona.
I can’t get away with things like, “This is a very serious class where you will learn things in the order that is best for you. Now we shall work together to produce classroom norms that are righteous and exemplary.” Then I pull out the Pied Piper’s pipe and lead my students to enlightenment in the most perfectly ordered line you have ever seen or imagined.
It takes a lot of time and money for companies to onboard new employees and incorporate them into the system. As a seasoned worker but a new employee, you are well aware that you are an outsider, hesitant to rock the boat until you feel like you have accrued enough respect. Vice versa, as a new person joins your team, you represent the status quo and the call to ensure the new team member learns the ropes without being overwhelmed while also integrating their new perspective. This is difficult and requires a lot of implicit trust, something any organization would like to not do so often. This is called “retention.” It is coveted.
Imagine doing this for 160 people in six different cohorts. Every year.
For a teacher, years into their practice, commanding 28 other people in a tiny room in which you will be judged, formally and informally, in more ways than just as an employee and teacher, it can feel like everyone’s been through this before 16,000 times and are over it. This is both true and not true.
What makes me nervous about the first day is not the inevitability that we will get to know each other. That happens. It always does. Life is always a slow roll to something.
What I’m getting at is that sometimes teaching feels artificial. Like your experience, sensibilities, and intellect, the more you gain in them, the more your students have also done so. As if they have been with you your entire career. It is a sort of deja vu. And it feels this way because I think we intrinsically transpose our own qualities onto the people in our immediate spheres, as if those who are not like us will forever be some “other,” never to be seen in our circles.
My seasoned mind has created a simulation, this imaginative empathy I have acquired as I travel further into adulthood and my career.
This is, of course, kind of ridiculous.
But, also, kind of not. Your students do come into the classroom with accumulated academic ennui. Many have learned that school is a game to be played. All are attuned to the hypocrisy of adults as their view, from their grey area vantage point between childhood and adulthood, of what’s behind the curtain widens.
The thing is, while I am a good human and will definitely be there for my students, the first days hold some sort of weird power of rigmarole that feels like it’s a very tall order to meet 28 people six times and sow the seeds of not just a community, but a learning community. For a guy who got into teaching not because of learning plan design or community building chops, but because of educational idealism–the role good education does for our democratic society–this is off-balancing.
But I manage. And I have actually turned into quite the community builder. Though it is not formal. More DIY punk rock-ish. But I have learned–whoa.
Openings, they are hard. Maybe ChatGPT does them better. But what matters is that you show you are human. I think. Too formal, and it will be a wash. Too silly, and it might be an “ugh.”
Before you judge me for not starting off the year like Goldilocks would want us to, perhaps there is no “just right.” Communities, if they are like anything else humans intrinsically build–like language–are both messy and structured. There is never true rightness amidst 160 people or in a class of 28. You are constantly relating and not relating. And maybe that’s what I’ve learned: in the long run, it will shake out.
And that tracks. It’s what I want my students to think about concerning their own writing and reading: It will work out if you keep at it. No event coordinator could pump up a crowd using that last sentence on, say, a huge banner. And that’s fine. There is almost no good advice that raises the dopamine of its audience. That in itself is the lesson, isn’t it?