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Teachers’ Back-to-School Fear, Anxiety and Excitement
By Lisa Sassano
It starts with the commercials. Then the newspaper circulars. It’s on the radio, television, and in storefronts everywhere. Parents cannot wait; you can almost see them holding their breath in the supermarkets or at the swim clubs- waiting for that moment. A moment of freedom and peace. The moment they can exhale. The moment that returns parents to child-free days; but it marks the end of freedom for us—the teachers.
Remember that feeling you would get as a kid as the summer days got shorter and cooler and you could smell school in the air? In the pit of your stomach there is a mixture of excitement and anxiety. You miss your friends but you don’t miss all the homework. When you are a kid you think you are the only ones who feel that way. But for teachers, it’s like being a kid all over again, every summer.
As Merle Reese, the voice of the Philadelphia Eagles, fills the airwaves with talk of training camp and pre-season games, I think to myself, it can’t be time for football already, we just got done school. I haven’t recovered yet.
But as that calendar turns to August the nightmares begin. Classrooms full of restless, uncontrollable children, not having supplies ready, not knowing what to wear—these are the nightmares of August that plague my last few weeks of freedom.
In the world of education it has been said that June is like an exciting, promised filled Friday night with the whole weekend lying ahead of you. July is as open and carefree as a sunny Saturday. Then there is Sunday. Anyone who works Monday through Friday knows what a Sunday feels like. Imagine having that Sunday feeling every day for 31 days…it gets mentally exhausting after awhile.
While August can be full of trepidation, it is also the time to unpack classrooms, design welcoming bulletin boards, and upon getting a class roster, imagine what the new class of kids will be like based solely upon their names. That first day speech plays over and over in my head, a different version each time. Not wanting to be too nice or too intimidating is the initial challenge. How much of my normally sarcastic personality do I reveal that first day?
Before you know it, nervous faces with clean, new uniforms and big empty backpacks appear quietly, hesitantly outside my classroom door. They are always quiet those first few days. It is the seventh graders first time in our building, so they approach it with a mixture of fear and bravado. So do we.
Abruptly summer is over as another school year begins. Have you ever tried to teach 30 kids how to use a combination lock for the first time in their lives? Talk about pressure. I can get students motivated to read, excited to write, and thrilled to learn about the past, but teach them to work a combination on their locker? Forget it.
“Left 23. Which is your left? Hold up your left hand. OK, now right all the way around, pass the 37 once, then keep going around until you get back to 37. Now, left, no left, not right, until you reach 0.” Whew! They try endless times; there are cheers, a few tears and the shiny blue locker gets dented a few times in the process. We are all sweating since our ancient building is not air-conditioned and it just happens to be 90 degrees on September 7 this year. Guess what, it isn’t even 8:30 AM yet. Just last week I was rolling over and going back to dreamland at 8:30 AM.
Once they get the hang of lockers, the students forget that they have to do it all again at the end of the day when the halls are full. Until you have seen 350 kids trying to open combinations on lockers at one time, you haven’t seen full on frustration and chaos.
Eventually they settle into a routine, and we do too. Every year I end up with the nicest, most motivated bunch of 12 and 13 year-olds I could hope for. Yes, 12 and 13 years can be nice, and they do like school.
When June rolls around, I actually dread the ending of the school year as much as I dread August. These wide-eyed seventh graders, who just a few short months ago were full of nerves and apprehension, have become my kids. And sending them on to the big, bad world of 8th grade is just as hard as getting to know them all in the beginning. I want to follow them, to protect them, to make sure they do the right thing. All of those nightmares I have in August become my dreams for my students’ futures.
