Most peculiar, Mama...
When I left my office at the Southeast Polk Teaching and Learning Resource Center last Friday, I expected to be welcomed back from the weekend by a hectic Monday. The week would start with the regular curriculum team meeting on Monday that would include planning a half day of professional development for our first-year teachers. Following that, I would dive into Data Director to start analyzing nine different unit pre and post-tests that teachers throughout the district had used to assess their students last week. I was looking forward to a busy day with my curriculum colleagues and our assessment data when our science coordinator Jim Pifer asked me if I knew school had been cancelled. I barely had time to respond to Jim when my phone lit up with texts from family members and colleagues wanting to know if I knew anything beyond what they knew from a district email and the news.
Nobody told me there'd be days like these...
That's not completely true. Somewhere along the line in ed school classes, it does get mentioned that teachers have to handle situations outside of pedagogy and standard student discipline, but it's hard to prepare educators for every situation. When we do discuss dealing with the unexpected, we at least expect those things to happen one at a time. It's hard to predict that the extra security that a school puts in place to deal with an anonymous social media threat will be pulled away due to unrelated acts of violence only a few minutes from the school at which the threats were directed.
Because we're working with first-year teachers tomorrow, I've spent a lot of time today thinking about the unexpected events of my first year of teaching. Classes at Stuart-Menlo High School were cancelled the day after Labor Day because a student went home after the football game the previous Friday night and shot himself with the hunting rifle he kept in his room. Midway through the year, the Stuart police showed up at my classroom door to arrest two juniors in my Basic Literature class for possession of marijuana. While I was filling in for the seventh grade math teacher so he could take his basketball players to an after school game, a boy in the class exposed himself to the girls who sat near him. One morning, one of the best actors on my speech team didn't make it to rehearsal because he tried to get through a railroad crossing before a train got there. In the days before electronic gradebooks, I had to completely rearrange my American Lit roster, because one of my students got pregnant and then got married, which meant her last name began with a W instead of an A. In addition to all that and a few more things I haven't listed, I was barely older than my seniors and looked young enough that the photographer on school picture day asked if I was a tenth grader.
Always something happening...
If there is one piece of advice I would give to new teachers, it's that you have to be flexible. Planning is vital; in fact, lack of planning is the root cause of a lot of classroom management problems. That doesn't change the fact that sometimes the real world gets in the way of your meticulous lesson plans. Sometimes it's one student who is having a bad day that throws everything out of whack. Sometimes it's an assembly you forgot about, or technology that doesn't work like you thought it would. And sometimes, the world beyond the school walls conspires against you and you're sent home for the day, despite the fact that you were ready to kick off a new week with the greatest class activity your students have ever experienced.
Where does that leave us? It depends on the situation. In this case, we have a second shot at a new school week tomorrow. As educators, it's in our best interests and in the best interests of our students to go into it well-prepared for anything that could happen, with the understanding that "anything" covers far more ground than we want it to.
(All of the quotes in this post were from John Lennon's song "Nobody Told Me.")
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