A note about this piece. I actually wrote this essay—in second-person as an added challenge—in 2000. And never submitted it anywhere. As mentioned in the preface to a previous post, that is one of the reasons why this 100 Day Challenge means so much to me. Now, 21 years later, here it is to share.

I was a public high school teacher for 10 years. The first year was survival. I’ll write more about the experiences, which are rich and layered. And made me forever passionate about supporting and promoting dedicated educators, creating a more effective and nurturing educational system, and always looking after kids, their rights and the care they need and deserve.

Anyway, my first day of teaching was something like this. I was 24 years old.

Warning Bell

The warning bell will ring soon, because today is your first day as a public high school teacher. You can’t believe it. It’s so exciting. You have known forever that this was the job for you, your calling. You love kids. You’re going to love it. Your very own classroom is at the end of B hall, room 11, next to the boy’s bathroom and the water fountain with the fluorescent green gum plastered to the spout, and near those blue double doors to freedom at ten after three. 

You must walk the long expanse of hall to get there. Flash back to your own adolescence, small in hallways like these, contemplating death poetically in a journal during math class, drawing flowers and aliens in the corners, writing your name beside names of people you liked. Extreme joy, excruciating boredom and fear—though you didn’t know what that awful, painful, sweaty feeling was at the time. 

How strange to be here now, wearing a new navy suit, hair drawn back, the costume of a grown-up in these surroundings where worry and self-consciousness once ruled. You have a ring of keys, responsibilities dangling from a pink telephone cord hung around your wrist. The jangle sounds important. You carry a heavy pile of paper, one ream of fresh white paper acquired at the bookroom, one hundred index cards, boxes of paper clips, two different sizes, a stapler, scotch tape, a new roll book and assignment book, a stack of classroom rules and syllabi on goldenrod, a friendly color for their first day, for your first day, to look good in their notebooks. Stacked delicately on top like biblical documents are your class lists—the names of the students you will enlighten and invigorate with learning—Your arms are falling off.

You make your way through swarms of acne-ed kids and harried-looking teachers, past slamming lockers and doors sucking in a funnel of teenagers at each. You pass a new colleague trying to remember her name. That’s right it’s Wurm. Ms. Wurm.

People with unfortunate last names become teachers. Their names take on magnified, loudspeaker inevitability in public schools where they become strangely normal. Harmless names take on pornographic pronunciations: Mr. Hard, Ms. Hancock, Mr. Tittman, Mrs. Wort, Ms. Ballsley, Mr. Dickman. 

This thought keeps you occupied until the warning bell squalls. Five minutes until the next bell, when you will begin teaching. You have made it back to your classroom in time, miraculously, and convince yourself you don’t really have to go to the bathroom, which is three hallways away. 

Trying to catch your breath, you position yourself by the front door to greet your young learners to Freshman English. You have written “Welcome!” in big balloon letters on the pasty green chalkboard. You have arranged the desks and chairs in two friendly U’s, put up posters of Twain and Shakespeare, Elie Weisel and Maya Angelou. You are proud of your clever display of quotes about the power of reading arranged like numbers on a clock, atop colored construction paper on the back wall. And here they come.

They shuffle past you into the room, they jut, they creep, they bounce, they saunter. Some have baseball cap bills for eyes. You say hello and a few look up, a few smile back, a few boom back “Hello!” happy to hear their own voices. The first ones all sit in the back, away from you. At one table, two girls already whisper gossip and curl their eyelashes, darken their lips, staring into their purses. A straggler or two down the hall run for your door, spilling papers on the floor from a backpack and the bell rings. A little nauseous, you take your place by the chalkboard.

You are standing in the front of the room. Alone. Eyes set in dark faces, light faces, red faces, round and long, pinched and droopy faces are all looking at you, mute, motionless, expectant. A pencil taps against a desk. A nervous thigh shakes against a squeaking table leg. That moment of silence is unbearable. You hate it. You want the students to speak, to move, anything. Later, you will recall with fondness this day, because it will be the last quiet day you have this year. But you don’t know that yet.

You introduce yourself, wondering whose high voice that is, whose surname that is. You welcome them to Freshman English and take roll. It is an out-of-body experience. You slaughter their names, names like the roll call at the United Nations: Anguiano, Abdallah, Apodaca, Batalla, Bernardini, Cascarejo, Chin, Chon, Dinh, Fong, Jones, Kawabata, Loreaux, Mcpherson, Michescu, Nguyen, Redhawk, Shahid, Zelada.

Then comes your first lesson, tripping over words, saying “okay, okay” more often then you thought possible, constantly checking your typed notes, proceeding: the course introduction, the personal survey, the getting-to-know you activity, their first night’s homework assignment, yes you have homework, the first group cry. Ninety minutes. Some moments seem endless; you keep hearing yourself talking. 

Suddenly, the bell squeals louder than before. Students pack and bolt, and you breathe relief. Your first class on your first day is over. Waving good-bye triumphantly, you call out, “See you tomorrow!” The armpits of your new shirt are stained. Your stomach churns and bubbles in a new way. Tottering toward your desk, a big wooden teacher desk, you want to sit down, bask in the completion of the period, but shuffling sounds at the door turn you around. A student comes in staring at the floor and sits with no noise in the back of your room, then another. You have ten minutes before it all starts again. 

Warning bell, starting bell, names, lessons, homework, “Homework?!,” ending bell. At a time when you normally eat breakfast, it’s lunchtime. You have forty minutes until the next round. You can now go to the bathroom, then the lunchroom and brave it with school lasagna or eat what you threw into the brown sack beneath your desk, a bruised apple, salami, and a pack of stale crackers. You haven’t shopped, haven’t done much of anything but prepare the last two weeks for this day. You settle on the bathroom and a Diet Pepsi.

At three-ten, after more bells, more names, more ”okay’s,” the final bell rings. Chairs scrape, papers rustle, zippers zip, new Nikes squeak, and young voices chatter out your door. You have forgotten to instruct students to put up the chairs, begin doing it yourself. You’ve lost your voice, a rubber band is knotted taut between your shoulder blades, but you did it. You are a teacher. 

Gum wrappers, abandoned pens and your goldenrod syllabi decorate the floor. You sit, your feet throbbing. The profoundness of it all and the relief that the first time is over—I should have taken public speaking in college, you think—causes your eyes to well up as you stare at Twain’s mustache.

During this next week, you will receive eight new students and have to go over all of it again, but you don’t know this yet. You don’t know that you will average seventy-five hours of work each week. Or that a week from now you’ll be grading papers at two in the morning crying; in a week and a half you’ll be called an asshole and get your first head cold. The next day, teaching anyway, you’ll break up your first fight, a tangle of girls with fingernails and teeth. You’ll get blood on your blazer. About this time, you will become an expert at writing referrals to the assistant principal’s office, wonder one morning, dragging, lesson plans half done, if you really ought to be a teacher. You don’t know that in three weeks, you will be explaining alternatives to a pregnant fourteen-year-old during lunchtime. That Friday night at your first dance supervision, you have to ask a young couple rubbing their bodies up and down each other to stop. Four weeks from now, you will start having meetings in your room every Tuesday, having been talked into being the Japanese Animation Club Supervisor. You are already a sophomore class advisor, community partnership committee member and assistant for a canned food drive. You don’t yet understand that in the warfare of public schools, with the need, possibilities, you have to often say NO. Progress reports come due. You find out at Kaiser that you have been teaching with a temperature for the past month. You take your first sick day, spending six hours the night before creating sub-plans. You come back to find that students watched How Stella Got Her Groove Back all period instead of doing your lesson plan. 

You will realize on average that you have broken into tears or rage twice a week, have never looked forward to Christmas so much, lost a student essay in the paper shuffle and lied about it, averaged four hours of sleep during the grading period, been called a nazi by a parent who can’t believe her son would plagiarize, and at least twenty other names than your own by students, including Grandma.

You will somehow survive the school year. You don’t know this is an issue yet, but you will. You will sleep away the end of June. You will suffer from short term memory loss over the summer and come back charged up to teach again next fall, with new reading quotes and new posters of Virginia Wolfe, Richard Wright and J.K. Rowling. 

But you don’t know this yet. Today, you are ecstatic, a soldier for humanity, Platonian, scholarly: you are a teacher, ready to expand young minds, teach the joy of learning, share your enthusiasm for reading and writing. It’s going to be great. You walk near the walls of your classroom, whistling, sweeping your fingertips over the old desks not knowing the trials ahead. You can’t hear that warning bell. Not yet.