The First Day of School: A Primal Terror Returns : Teaching: I’m a teacher of third-graders, and tonight I will feel like a third-grader.
I am writing this on the last night of summer vacation. School starts tomorrow, and even though I’m 37 years old and have been teaching for several years, I’m still filled with that gnawing unease that I felt on these same nights many years ago and many miles distant.
It is, and was, a kind of performance anxiety, I suppose, not all that different from stage fright. As a teacher, and as a student, you have to show up that first day, you have to deliver and you have to maintain your poise no matter what they throw at you.
Tonight, in the wee hours, after I peek at the clock and punch my pillow, my mind will wander back to those early September nights in western Pennsylvania, 25, 30 years ago.
The night before school, my mother and I laid out my clothes on the end of the bed. My father wandered in and reminded me how important it was to make a good impression on the first day.
I popped up before the alarm, thinking I’d overslept. When I saw it was only 5 o’clock, I dozed off, only to be awakened again by my father’s gargling. That day I envied him his workaday routine. He didn’t have to face new teachers and prove himself all over again. Once I said to him, “You don’t know what pressure is.”
My mother, in her bathrobe and slippers, was already in the kitchen when I came downstairs. There was a glass of orange juice at my place and French toast was sizzling on the grill. She promised that she would be home at 3 o’clock to hear all about my day.
At 7, the whistle at the downtown Bethlehem Steel plant blew and echoed through the valley. At 7:20 or so, I kissed my mom and headed out.
The ground was dewy, and the first hint of autumn chilled the hazy, sulfuric air. I wore penny loafers; new and stiff, they crunched with every step. At the bus stop, I waited with kids I hadn’t seen since June. Finally, the bus came into view and pulled curbside. I got on, flashed my bus pass and plopped onto a springy, squeaky seat next to the one guy I could talk to.
The smells of that first day stay with me. The buffed hallway floors, the metallic lockers, the woody pencil shavings, the musty books, the fresh book covers, the Prell shampoo on the girl in front of me, the boiled hot dogs in the cafeteria.
It was hot during seventh period. It was still summer. On my book receipts, I wrote the date, and as I did, I could feel the year sprawling out before me. It seemed endless. Christmas was months away. June was inconceivable.
Traumatic events leave a deep imprint in our minds. There must be some cerebral circuit that sizzles with current when we face danger, risk or the unknown. In my childhood--a relatively safe, secure childhood--there could not have been many nights more fraught with tension than the one before the first day of school. Being older, less vulnerable and of the system, doesn’t lessen the fear. The dread I feel is encoded in my mental wiring and can’t be explained away. And so tonight I will lie in bed, and when I sleep I will dream of standing in front of my class with no pants on, and when I awake I will see I’ve slept for only 90 minutes. I’m a teacher of third-graders, and tonight I will feel like a third-grader, and the only cure is the school bell that announces the end of the first day.
