Today was the first day of school and it went great! I arrived at the school at 7:15 feeling excited but also slightly underprepared. There were a few things I didn't quite have time to arrange in the way I wanted. I most of it done by 7:45 and then headed down to the playground to meet my new class. The halls and the schoolyard were both empty.

For a second I flashed back on the joke that all the teachers were making yesterday because the halls were still jam packed with computers and bookshelves: "It's a good thing school isn't starting tomorrow." Maybe I had missed something?

Nope. Just a bit of the school's typical chaos. Turns out that on the first day, school doesn't start until 9:30. Nobody told the new girl! So that was kind of annoying...but I had an unexpected hour and a half to get more stuff done, so all's well that ends well.

My traditional opening activity is to have the children make dreamcatchers. I show them my example, then give them the raw materials and let them go from there without any directions. Right away I get to see who dives in, who waits until someone else has figured it out, who asks for help, who offers it. And the kids are engaged in an activity that also permits them to do what they really want to be doing anyway: Talking to their friends and seeing what everyone had been up to all summer.

Rajanique was frustrated and confused by the lack of direction and wasn't afraid to vocalize it, repeatedly. Anthony quietly scoped out the supply table and got up to get what he needed whenever he saw fit. Taylor was eager to please; she kept raising her hand for permission to get materials even though I had told them all to take what they needed freely. Marquette is one of those boys that needs to stand up and walk every so often as he works. Ernest, the new kid, wasn't quite sure what he had gotten himself into but made the best of it. Rakia took my request to "write down one of your dreams" literally and tried to fit the entire plot of a nightmare on a tiny circle of paper. All in all, a typical group of ten year olds.

And their dreams? To be rich. World peace. To be a scientist. To always have friends. To end war. To be on national television. To have the best 11th birthday party ever.

So cute!

Don't want to be a total negatron so today I will concentrate on some of the good things that have happened with respect to school so far.

One: My classroom has been freshly painted, and it is a lovely shade of pale aqua. It feels clean and calm.

Two: After nine hours in the room today, and with the help of my brother Joseph and his lovely girlfriend Melanie, I have something resembling an organized elementary classroom. It will still be a long day tomorrow, but I'm not panicking anymore.

Three: I poached a nice easy chair from the school's 'library' today. It will be put to good use in my reading corner until someone misses it, which will be a long time since the school doesn't have a librarian. And it even matches my walls. Sort of.

Four: I have put together an almost respectable classroom library, without spending a ton of my own money. Research says that to optimally encourage independent reading, you need at least 20 books per child in the room. Since I have only 11 kids I think I'm hitting that benchmark. Most of the books came from a neglected shelf of hand-me-downs that actually had a ton of good stuff. The secretary said they were donated a couple of years ago but nobody's ever looked at them. I found like 40 Newberry Medal books and a lot of other quality, grade-level stuff. Yaay!

Five: In addition to the books that kids can self-select from, I have classroom sets of several good novels. So although the school has no office-supply type of stuff, they have fairly decent instructional resources. (Since this is a positives-only post, I will refrain from mentioning the state of the science and social studies textbooks at the moment.)

Six: The teacher next door to me is super nice. Her name is Ms. Thomas and she's been teaching 1st grade at the school for 14 years. She's really gone out of her way to make me feel welcome. Among other things, she recognized my frustration with the bulletin board situation and somehow procured paper and borders for me. And she gave me some paint so I could repaint the bookshelves in my room, which were either really dirty or this horrid shade of neon green. Now they're a nice buttery yellow.

Seven: Only one more day til I get to meet my kids!

A Montessori educator once told me that "children learn to share out of plenty, not out of want." I'm sure there are competing psychological theories out there about this sort of thing and lots of counterexamples of folks with next-to-nothing still finding enough to share. Just the same, it was a maxim that I took to heart.

One way I have tried to put the theory into practice is in my organization of classroom materials. All the supplies students need are in abundance, available for the taking, organized and replenished as needed, but otherwise unmonitored*. I just don't believe in rationing pencils. It seems wiser to me to teach children stewardship through example and by giving them actual opportunities to practice it.

Our faculty meeting today suggested that my stance on supplies is, well, shall we say, slightly different from the other teachers'. I won't even go into the whole conversation about whether or not a kindergartener should be able to make a pack of 16 crayons last a whole year. (Although if you're interested, the consensus seemed to be that it shouldn't be a problem, especially if the crayons were the fat kind, unless the child was 'wasting wax.')

The real eye-opener was the principal's announcement that the *teacher* supply closet was going to be monitored! If I want construction paper or whatever else they supposedly have in there, I have to fill out a request and give it to the lead teacher the day before.

This struck me as so...wrong!...that I really wanted to say something. But I refrained because I had already made the point, a few moments earlier, that the new rule that all copying would go through the Approved Copy Machine User seemed a bit restrictive. The rule was instituted in response to "somebody breaking the machine all the time because they don't know how to use it." I suggested training, and added that it was a copy machine, not a space shuttle, and as college-educated professionals surely we could all learn to use it appropriately. The principal said she "heard" me and she would consider training. Some of the other young teachers gave me looks that said they were glad I spoke up. But the veterans objected. "When somebody breaks the machine we all suffer. If we just have one person to use it, and it breaks, then we know whose fault it is." And this sentiment seemed to carry the day.

I'll set aside a discussion of the possibility that the 'fault' really lies with the fact that schools are routinely forced to make do with substandard copying equipment that is simply not powerful enough to handle the capacity required. And I won't comment on the mentality that we should be worried about who to blame when equipment fails.

Larger issues, ones that will definitely be with me throughout the school year, are betrayed by the restriction of teachers' access to the basic tools needed for their job. One is that faculty members are not thought of, or thinking of themselves as, professionals. Also, clearly the principal does not trust her staff. I'm not sure yet whether the staff is trustworthy or not, but I will appeal to another favorite maxim of mine: People who are treated as though they cannot be trusted become untrustworthy. I know I'm already becoming a shady character who plans to sneak onto the copy machine after hours, and I'm contemplating breaking and entering the supply closet...

*All the supplies except for the thumb tacks. My deeply held belief in the goodness of children has some practical limits.

"There goes the neighborhood!"

--Shouted at/about me as I walked from my school to the metro this afternoon

My principal scrounged up a pair of adult scissors for me, and threw in a new stapler and a roll of tape. It's on!

Is it a sin to throw away a set of 1972 Funk n Wagnalls?

If so, bless me, for I have sinned.

I am cleaning out a jam-packed teacher's closet in the hopes of creating an organized environment for teaching and learning. I began hoping to find lots of useful stuff. So far, that hope seems to have been in vain. The closet was once the province of a teacher who retired after 30 years. Apparently her curriculum consisted entirely of holiday-themed activities involving ancient Hallmark decorations.

But at least my room has a closet, and there are things in it. The same cannot be said for the rest of the school. Between yesterday and today, I have requested the following items from the secretary:

1. A pair of 'adult' scissors.
2. A stapler. And staples.
3. A sponge and bucket.
4. A single pack of post-its.
5. Construction paper or bulletin board paper.

The secretary is very nice, but has been unable to give me any of these things. Either the school does not have them at all, is waiting for them to arrive, or the secretary cannot find them because volunteers are painting her office and she boxed up all her stuff.

However, this does not stop the other teachers from reminding me that I should really get to work on my bulletin boards. My co-workers are obsessed with bulletin boards. I am not sure how this sort of thing happens.

I'm also not sure why there are NO SUPPLIES OF ANY SORT in the building. My principal is certainly dedicated, and apparently spends a good deal of time asking for donations from pretty much everywhere she can think of. The problem is: the places she thinks of just aren't all that great. And so, practically everything in the school is a well-worn hand-me-down. Consumable items (e.g. sponges, paper, and post-its) are hard to come by that way. And the non-consumables...well, they are just things that nobody wants any more. Therefore, I have a closet full of educational software on old floppy disks...and when I say old, I mean the big card-board covered kind. The kind I used when *I* was in elementary school.

I threw those away along with the encylopedias.

I got my class list.

Only 11 kids! This will be a wonderful year. I have always said that there is no teacher so bad that they can mess up a truly small class. That may be one of those things I always say that has no basis in fact. But now I get to see what happens when a good teacher gets an imminently manageable class size!

Already I am doing things I wouldn't do with a group of 20 or 25. For instance, I hand-wrote each child a personal note introducing myself and mailed them. It took me about 90 minutes and cost $10 ($5.99 for a box of 12 note cards, and $4.07 in postage). If I had a regular sized class, I wouldn't have made the effort. Investing 3 hours and $20 would have seemed like too much time and money for such a small gesture. But I'm really glad I was able to make the gesture. I feel better knowing that each of my students will arrive on the first day of school already knowing their teacher's name and hopefully thinking that she's probably nice. And they will also know that the fifth grade has been moved down to the second floor.

Besides the small size, another interesting dynamic of the group is that there are 4 boys and 7 girls. Not sure how that will play out...

But I do know that those 11 kids are in for quite a year!