I wrote this article based on my sister's experience as a teacher which she has shared with me.
Dear second-year teacher,
The whole time I was in college and student teaching, I was being prepared for the big first year. Everything was in reference to my first year as a teacher. Seasoned teachers both in my professional and personal life would tell me about how tired I would be, or give me tips for how to keep my life less stressful and more organized. I found that everyone agreed—your second year would be easier. You would have lessons to refer to, you would be comfortable at your school and with your colleagues, you would know the answers to parent questions. The second year is what you look forward to. But the advice stopped there.
When I started my second year as a professional educator, with a file cabinet full of resources and half my decorations still up from the previous year, I was confident. I had a fabulous first year. I kept my kids engaged and gave special attention to those that needed it. I was proud of how I had managed my classroom and overcome our problems within it. I got to know my coworkers and had good relationships with them. I taught my kids so many things in just that short year! I was ready to tackle this second one with more experience and less tears.
The first day came. I walked to the gym slowly, ready and excited to greet the new smiling faces I would bring back to my bright classroom. I saw them and...
I wanted nothing to do with them.
They hadn’t said a word. Some were nervous or crying, clinging to their moms. Most were beaming with excitement, ecstatic to see me and jumping up and down. They were five years old, so obviously completely adorable.
But I didn’t want anything to do with them.
Maybe now you’re thinking that I’m not fit to be an educator. Or maybe you think I had a premonition that this was going to be one of these horrific years with a nightmare class. Neither of those is the case.
I just loved my babies so much. There they were, in the line NEXT to the kindergarten line. I asked them about their summers and they shyly smiled at me. I reminded them to be good listeners and to try their best, and that they would have so much fun in first grade. I looked at my new class, and I didn’t want them. There was no JaJuan, Jose, Giana, Gabriel, Talicia, Rhyianna, Audrie, Luisa, Hugo, Marky, Christopher, or Landin. I didn’t know what to say to these kids! Who were they?! I wanted my babies! There they were in that big first grade line, watching Mrs. Hoffman explain their new procedures to them, hanging on her every word. Most significantly, they weren’t paying attention to me at all. They wanted to be in first grade. They were ready because I had made sure they would be. But I was 100% not ready. The feeling knocked the wind out of me.
Of course it wasn’t like I really disliked my new class, but that is the best way to describe the feeling personified by the little voice in my heart saying, “No! No! No! Run away!” when I saw them that morning. How was there any way I could ever teach them and be happy and fulfilled?
Everyone is full of advice for your first year as a teacher, but no one prepares you for the event of that first class being ripped away from you. They don’t need you anymore, and often they don’t really want you anymore either. I have heard other teachers say they get in their car on the last day of school and cry, but that has never happened for me. When you leave in May, they are still yours. It never hits me until I see them in August. When you see them across the hall, and know they are not on their way back to your classroom, you experience a stabbing in your heart unlike any other feeling.
I was young, 22, at the start of my first year. In my interview with my principal I remember her telling me there is something sacred about your first year. She told me she still remembered everything about that first morning, down to what she was wearing. She told me on my first day to take time in the morning to sit at my desk, and think about the fact that these were the last moments of “before”. Savor that feeling of expectancy mixed with shear nerves. She said that feeling is unmatched, and after I experienced it I knew she was right. We both cried a little in that interview, my first time in my first school with everything still in front of me.
My first class was so incredibly special. It was small, just 13, and we were a family, plain and simple. They taught me to be a teacher. They were my very best friends. Everyday for my first year of adulthood I was with them. Laughing and crying and making it up as we went. I wrote down the funny things they said. I sat in the hallway on the tile floor with them one-on-one when the classroom was too overwhelming and the new information too hard to understand. When I had a personal crisis mid-year, it was them who kept me going. They could sense my bad days. “Miss Alsbach, you look like an angel,” one said in a particularly hard moment. I drew a picture with sidewalk chalk of our class on the playground once and one of my girls said, “Look, it’s our family!” I was hooked. The love I felt for them by the time we got to May was strong.
But the love I felt for them in the following August was even stronger.
I remember during my first week of my second year I text my student teaching mentor and asked, “Does this part ever get any easier?” What I can tell you is that nothing is like that feeling on the first day of school your second year, it can’t be replicated, but it will never be completely easy if you are the kind of teacher that I hope anyone reading this strives to be.
Of course, after a short few weeks, I loved my second class fiercely. As the year went by, I got to know them more and more each day, and my first babies grew bigger and bigger across the hallway. Suddenly it was May, and I realized with a certain dread, “Oh, no…I did it again,” I fell in love with them all over again. They were my family. We had learned, laughed and cried together. I had to agonizingly start my third year teaching without my 19 best friends from the year before.
Soon, it was the first day of my third year of teaching, I walked outside to greet my new class, saw their sweet, hopeful faces, and I couldn’t help but hear that little voice again, telling me, “Nope. I want nothing to do with them.”
To all of my babies and their parents, thank you for sharing them with me.
