The Green Mile

Today is my Official start day back at school. The kids don’t come until the day after Labor Day, though I will get to meet them on August 31. It’s always funny to me how Meet the Teacher night goes. The kids stare at you as though you have horns and fangs. They don’t know how to shake hands. From their demeanor, I half-expect them to grab their mother’s thigh and hang on for dear life, just like toddlers.

From my perspective, I meet about 90 kids in the space of an hour. Inevitably, a mother comes up to me and tries to give me her son or daughter’s life history. :blahblah: He/she needs special seating, they need their homework monitored, yadda yadda, and all the while the poor kid wants to curl up and die in a mortified heap. :help: I usually send the kid a look of sympathy. But what these moms don’t realize is that I will remember none of this on the first day of school. It’s not like an elementary classroom where I only have 28-30 warm bodies. It’s more like 110-115 warm bodies. I really won’t remember any of this. So I try to look the kid in the eye and tell him/her that if they need to be near the front, to choose a seat there on the first day. :headbang:

I’m entering my ninth year of teaching. In some ways, it feels like the Green Mile, facing an execution. :shocked: Thank God for the kids. They’re the ones who make it all worthwhile. The first week of school is a circus, inundated with all those awful forms to fill out, rules to review, and names to remember. But when I start to bond with my classes, when individual personalities emerge and make me laugh with their off-the-wall comments, it’s worth every moment. Middle-schoolers have an energy and a sense of pluck that some people never really understand. I love them dearly. They wear their hearts on their sleeves and when you look in their eyes, you see the adult they’ll become one day. And when they earn that 100% on a quiz, or when they come running down the hall to tell you–”Mrs. Willingham! We just got a dog at our house!”–and you were the first one they wanted to tell…it just makes you smile. That’s why I teach.