First Day of School

Throwback to Day One of the 12-13 school year. Sideburns are out of control.

Tomorrow is the first day of school. It's my eleventh as a teacher, to go with roughly seventeen as a student (counting kindergarten, elementary, middle, high school and college). As a friend pointed out to me recently, with a combination of amazement and derision, I've never experienced a year without a summer break. Such is the life of a career student and teacher. I was thinking this morning that I would try to write about an interesting first day of school from years past, but I quickly determined that this was impossible. Nothing interesting tends to happen on the first day of school. In fact, I find that I remember only a handful of specific events from any of those first days.

For me, the first day of school as a student was mostly about saying hi to old friends, seeing who had a new haircut or had otherwise changed their appearance in a radical way, trying to get a feel for which teachers I would like and which ones I wouldn't, and of course, finding out if I had classes with any girls I had a crush on.

The first day of school as a teacher is even less interesting. It mostly consists of me talking at an awkwardly silent room. (Even generally talkative classes tend to be pretty quiet on the first day. If they aren't, I know I am probably in for a long year.) I am at my most boring on Day One, and having been a student myself, I know that most students have too much on their mind to really focus on what I'm saying anyway. But the way I see it, it's pointless to teach content on the first day because they won't remember that either. So I'm going through my syllabus, dammit. Because I took the time to write it and there is no chance that high school kids will read it on their own.

Here are a few scattered recollections from first days of school past:

• On the first day of seventh grade, at least six kids showed up wearing the same Green Day "Dookie" shirt. (But not me! I was proudly wearing my Weezer "Blue Album" t-shirt.) They weren't even friends either, so I doubt they coordinated it. By November, it was impossible to find a seventh grader who hadn't disavowed the album completely. Seventh graders were fickle like that.

• As a first-year teacher, I wanted to make an immediate impression on my kids and I guess I felt that going through my syllabus, while informative, just wouldn't do the trick. So I started off the first period of my first class by reciting all of "A Boy Named Sue" from memory. I guess it did the trick, but I'm still not exactly positive why I did that. And it's definitely not something I'll ever do again - especially on the first day.

• I used to give this little questionnaire to my students on the first day, which asked them to provide some basic biographical information and a fun fact about themselves. The fun facts were almost never interesting. I have no doubt that many of the kids did in fact have a fun fact or two to share, but they generally went for the safest, blandest statement they could muster. Like, "I like soccer" or "My favorite color is blue." One time though, a student wrote down, "I am one of only two Asian students in this class." And then, another one wrote, "I am the other Asian." So that was helpful.

• I once asked a student what her name was, and she told me that it was "Shadee." I've since learned that Shadee is a Persian name meaning "happiness," but at the time I had never heard it before and I couldn't understand what she was saying. I thought the girl (who incidentally turned out to be totally lovely and sweet) was saying "Shorty" - or more accurately, "Shawty." As in "Dayummmm Shawty!" Basically, I thought she was having a laugh at my expense. So I think I said something sarcastic like, "Ok, whatever, Shawty." And then I looked down at my roster, and felt like a jerk.

• On my first day at B.L. I tried to engage my class in some sort of name game icebreaker. This was pretty standard procedure in public school when I taught classes of thirty or so kids. But this didn't work quite as well for a class of ten boys, most of whom had known each other since kindergarten. "We already know each other's names," one of them told me, "Actually, you're the only one we don't know."