Happy New Year!

I don't care what the calendar says, the new year always begins on the first day of school.

This morning I went to indoor water aerobics for the first time following a wonderful outdoor summer experience. The parking lot was jammed, not by exercisers but with the cars of that school district's teachers who were having their opening day meetings at the middle school next door.

I wanted to be there.

As much as it was painful to get back into the saddle every August, that first day of school for teachers was always exciting, fun, depressing, and scary all at the same time. In the last few years of my teaching career, my school district started with a staff breakfast in one of the elementary school gyms. We junior high people would find each other and hurry to make up tables of "our" people. We'd catch up on who traveled where, who became engaged or was pregnant, whose kids went to what college for the first time, who mysteriously wasn't there.

All too soon they herded us into the auditorium for the opening meeting. Here the junior high teachers appropriated the last three rows, much to the consternation of the front row sitting elementary teachers who seemed to be much more "pleasers" than we were. We'd sit through the introductions of new staff members who were embarrassed to stand in front of all these strangers. We'd sit through the board member's address and that of the superintendent. Usually we then had a keynote speaker - sometimes great, often not - and I'd be embarrassed that my colleagues and I were not always a very receptive audience.

(As someone who now sometimes goes to schools to give seminars during their orientation week, I'm acutely aware of the fact that the teachers are not there by choice! I know they'd much rather be in their classrooms getting ready! Fortunately, foreign language teachers are wonderful people and, in spite of the timing, have been wonderful audiences. I am glad, however, that I don't get evaluated by teachers at the "on-site" seminars. A teacher during orientation week can be dangerous!)

Finally we'd be released to go to our respective buildings for yet more meetings and a PTA sponsored lunch. Here's where things got muddier. We'd hear about what committees had decided what new thing we'd be doing this year. We'd get our schedules and class lists - along with those scary IEP or "504 plan" papers with a "see me" note from the learning resource teacher or counselor. We'd have team meetings and fall right back into our previous patterns of behavior. We'd have an in-service to learn about yet another new grade book program. And then we might get 20 minutes to work in our rooms!

Of course, almost everyone had already spent several days at school during the previous weeks - moving furniture that had been misplaced during the summer cleaning, finding books that had been delivered to the wrong room, decorating bulletin boards, getting a turn at the copy machine with all those first week handouts, and, yes, writing lesson plans.

Not too many professions are blessed with a fresh start every year. I don't think medical people get excited about lining up IV tubing and hypodermic needles in the way that teachers love neatly arranged pencils, clean desks, and orderly stacks of new books. Rod Blagojevich's lawyers don't get a summer break to recover from the trial before moving into the next one. We get to start all over and eternally hope that this year will be the one where we get it completely right!

Teachers in my district start tomorrow. I'll be at lunch with our district's retired group that always meets on the teacher's first day of school. We'll have a nice lunch....but part of each of us misses that newness of the first day of school.

Happy New Year everyone!