Students have back-to-school anxiety books to soothe their fears, but where are copies of “The Student From the Black Lagoon” or “Mrs. Smith and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day” to soothe the nerves of teachers?
All student nightmares of not being able to find the classroom and showing up to school inappropriately dressed are multiplied in the nightmares of teachers who have the same anxieties. We dream of first days without textbooks, of standing in front of the room in bathing suits, of arriving at the wrong school or the wrong classroom.
When a teacher opens the door to the classroom, whether it is kindergarten, twelfth grade, or college—behind that smiling face is a person who lost just as much sleep as students did the night before the first day. We’re just better at hiding it.
A low level of angst usually begins around four weeks before the start of school. Have I read books I’ve not taught before? Have I reread books I taught a year ago? (Teachers’ memories are just as short-lived as students’.) By the time I’d taught “1984” fifteen or twenty times, I sometimes didn’t reread every page, but learned to reread all my underlines and notes. There are some books I always reread, no matter how many times I’ve taught them, just because the language is so beautiful.
Two weeks before classes start there’s a dreadful moment when I might realize I don’t remember ordering textbooks. Usually the ordering happens like clockwork—about six months before the semester starts. But occasionally classes are changed, or schedules are put into place late, and the magic reminders from the department are sitting on page 6 of my inbox and near-disaster occurs. Thankfully, last-minute book orders are no surprise to bookstores and students are quite flexible, too, as long as you don’t give a quiz on a book they haven’t been able to buy yet.
Other last-minute worries for teachers include realizing you didn’t do everything you hoped to develop the perfect curriculum for the coming year, and also realizing your classes meet at inconvenient times, or include the student the previous year’s teacher called “the kid from hell.”
While I was teaching high school, I never showed other teachers my class lists because “the kid from hell” invariably turned out to have grown up a bit during the summer, and I didn’t want to harbor negative expectations.
Teachers fear Murphy’s Law, that what can go wrong often will go wrong in the early days of each new year, and that’s what we dread the most. By the following fall, however, most of those nightmares have been blocked from our conscious memories, and it’s only in our disrupted sleep cycles that it all begins to come back to us.
Whether we are stuck with “The Principal from the Black Lagoon” or that “Terrible, Horrible No Good, Very Bad Day,” our comfort is not in the encouraging books many of our students are reading. We have their energy and youth to keep us going, and that is the beginning of what I hope will be—for all teachers—a year of sweet dreams.
Erica Jacobs teaches at George Mason University. Email her at [email protected].
