August: First Day Tips for New Elementary School Teachers
Making sure the first day of school goes smoothly for yourself and your students is all in the prep.
By Phillip Done
July 26, 2022
At the start of the school year, sometimes parents would forward me their kids’ first-day-of-school photos, and some of them were pretty creative. One year a mom sent me a shot of her son holding a small whiteboard with the words: “Help me! I have ten more years of these pictures!” Another year a dad shared a photo of his backpacked kids standing beside their pool and pretending to cry while he floated on a raft, cocktail in hand. My favorite first-day photo wasn’t a kid’s. It was a colleague’s. In it, he held a handwritten sign with the date and the number of years he’d been teaching. The sign said: “I can’t believe I let my wife take this.”
Without a doubt, the first day is the most important day of the school year. It’s the day teachers begin to introduce rules, establish routines, practice procedures, and learn which kids need to be moved to a different seat. Of course, it’s the day you meet your new students. I liken the start of school to an arranged marriage. You don’t know whom you’re going to meet. The difference is that in an arranged marriage, you get only one new set of parents. At school, you get dozens.
Courtesy of Simon & Schuster
The first day of each new school year, my morning routine was always the same. I’d wake up before the alarm clock went off because I was excited. I’d put on the freshly ironed dress shirt and slacks that I hadn’t seen in two and a half months. I’d slip on dress shoes that I hadn’t set eyes on since June. And every year I would have to knot my tie a couple of times till I got it right because I was out of practice.
I like first days of school. I like their freshness: the new clothes and school supplies, the new backpacks and haircuts. But most of all, I like the first-day buzz. All schools have different kinds of excitement: field trip excitement, Friday-before-break excitement, snow day excitement, school play excitement. My favorite is day-one excitement. Every start of school has a palpable wish-I-could-bottle-it excitement in the air. In most jobs, there’s only one first day. In teaching, you get one every year.
As much as I enjoy the first day of school, it’s always a shock to the system. One day it’s summer, and the next, it’s Bam! Pow! Wham! You feel like you’ve been thrown into a Marvel comic. In twenty-four hours, your brain goes from summer mode to overdrive. There’s no transition, no easing into it. It’s like relaxing on a peaceful beach one minute, then getting slammed by a tsunami. One of the reasons the first day is such a shock for teachers is because we’re not in teacher shape yet. When the new school year begins, it will have been months since we ran to a copier, speed-walked to a bathroom, blew a whistle, raced to the blacktop because we forgot we had yard duty, or ran across campus because we were late for a staff meeting. Even our teacher look is rusty.
