Reflections: Then and Now
Submitted by Frank Murphy, Sept. 7, 2010
Across the city today most teachers are meeting for the first time with a new group of students. Others, such as teachers of art, music and physical education, are reacquainting themselves with the children they worked with during the last school term. A new year has begun in the world of school. Anticipation and anxiety fill the air.
This month has always been the most difficult one for me as a teacher. Getting a classroom up and running smoothly is a demanding task. Establishing routines and procedures dominates the opening days. The process of setting expectations and creating boundaries is hard work. The pay off takes time so a good teacher has to be a patient person.
September through October is the time when the foundation of classroom management is built. These are the get-to-know-you months. Teachers struggle to pronounce students’ names that have more vowels than their teachers’ tongues can sometimes handle. They feel little pangs of embarrassment as the children giggle at their mispronunciations. This is when they discover who among the faces before them will be the ones who will test and challenge their authority.
As you become a more experienced teacher, these days grow more wearisome. You are long past the excitement of the adventure of being a new teacher. You miss your class from last year. You knew one another. The students understood what to do and when to do it. Everyone knew how to work together. You could joke and play and things didn’t get out of hand. The work got done and you had fun doing it. In September, you want to just get down to business but this new group has to be settled in first.
My most consistent memory year after year of the first day has always has been the same. I climb out of the car after arriving home. I am hot and exhausted. I stop for a moment and admire the flowers in my garden. They are at the height of their bloom. So beautiful, I think. Then I remember back to the spring when I had turned the soil as I prepared to plant the seeds. It was hard work. When I was finished, my flowerbeds looked bare and puny. In the spring, it was the vision of the beauty yet to come that inspired me. It is the anticipation, the hope, and the knowledge of the beauty that can bloom which keeps me a gardener. It is also the same as a teacher.
In this brief moment of contemplation, I find the comfort and strength that I need to get through the opening weeks of school. I know that come next June I will have seen another group of children bloom and flower. My efforts will be rewarded. Then I walk into the cool of my house and collapse onto the sofa, exhausted from the labor of the day’s tilling.
How did your day go?