Blogs on New Teachers

It was back to school night. I was teaching American History. A parent asked me, somewhat accusingly, "Given your liberal bias, how do you plan to teach the New Deal?" My assumption was that this was a Republican parent. My response was, "Well, as to being a liberal, guilty as charged! But as a history teacher, I have a responsibility to help students look critically at the varied perspectives of historical events. I give equal and fair time to Wilkie and other good Republicans." After the session ended, we chatted about how FDR tried to stack the Supreme Court, and I told him I was aware that FDR didn't walk on water.

There's nothing like the excitement students and teachers feel when school starts. Kids are excited to see who's in their class and what types of great things they're going to learn. Teachers spent their summer tweaking lessons and creating brand new ones, and now they're excited about engaging the next set of students sitting patiently in their chairs just waiting to be taught. OK, it might not be exactly like that, but there is an energy at the start of the school year that is already fading as Halloween decorations start to appear in stores.

Even though I haven't been a student or a classroom teacher in a long time, the beginning of a new school year still fills my stomach with butterflies. For me, September still signifies crisply ironed clothes, spotless new shoes, and clean loose-leaf paper in an as-yet-untarnished new binder. As a teacher, the summer vacation gave me the time I needed to recover from the insatiable demands that being alone in a room with 20 or so burgeoning adolescents inevitably placed on me. I spent the last weeks of summer dipping into my own pocket to make sure that my classroom was beautifully appointed with pictures, posters, and various sundry learning tools; and that my bulletin boards stood at the ready -- waiting to showcase the brilliance that was sure to emerge from my students in those early months of the school year.

For those of us in the field of educating young minds, we often find that summer does two things rather well. First, it helps us remember a time when our first names weren't Mister or Miss for the majority of the day and when we didn't have to break out into a vibrant soliloquy whenever the tenor of a room didn't feel right. Secondly, it abruptly breaks us out of our own routines for how we go about our days. We don't follow the bells or the crowds swooshing past the hallways to their next stations.