The First Day and the Official First Day

I attended the first day of school this past Monday. It was pretty hectic. I think what I took most from the experience is that teachers probably need more than one week of pre-planning if you wish to be close to fully prepared on the first day. I believe this is largely due to new mandates of required curriculum that everyone is expected to keep pace with. So, it becomes a team effort since you have to stay together as teachers and assistants. If it were just one person planning for one class, you could do that on your own throughout the summer, but with so much collaboration needed, it’s hard to get it all done in one week.

Today was my first official day. I tried to spend time getting to know different students whenever opportunities presented themselves. Media center time was great for this because many of them needed help searching for a book on the new search engine, “Destiny Quest,” which is a great way for children to research books and locate them in the library.  When they were having trouble deciding, a natural question that helps me get to know some of them was, “What are you interested in or like to do?”

I got my first great surprise when a kid, who is usually a goofball and not very serious, gave a wonderful interpretation of a photograph during writing today. Here’s the image:

The student said, and I’m paraphrasing, “It looks dark behind him, where he is coming from, like he might have had a bad life there. In front of him, it looks like there is light, like it might be brighter and a better place for him to go and have a good life.”  I could not help but be impressed and wonder if they had previously studied “light and dark” themes/representations, or possibly from what experiences this student could have been drawing.

Something else that I have quickly noticed, as far as teacher duties goes, is that there lots of meetings involved in such a collaborative effort. Just today we had a morning planning meeting with all fifth grade teachers, interventionists, and special ed. teachers. During planning, there was a data team meeting with the Principal and Asst. Principal.  Also, to end the day, another data team meeting that did not include the Principal or Asst. Principal.