the first day: two classrooms down
Quick background study: was born; pawed at the newspaper before I could sit up; began keeping a diary at age eight after reading Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl; decided I wanted to be a writer when I grew up and stuck to it (as a pip, I wanted to be a paleontologist or an astronaut); fell in love with English as an area of academic study in high school and doubled up on English classes, crammed gym into the spare pockets to clear the way; dreamed of getting an MFA from Iowa, where my father proclaimed the best of the best writers get their MFA; went to Minnesota for my undergraduate, graduated, panicked; returned to Minnesota for my M.Ed and taught high school English for three years, panicked, returned to school for my MFA; had two children; published some chapbooks and a book and a bunch of poems and essays; started a press; adjuncted (or sadjuncted, as my friend BEJ likes to say); panicked: fell in love with a method, went back to school and taught simultaneously, or rather, went back to school in the summer, the intense, heady summer, with two summers to go, and taught during the school year, and here I am, the other side of my first year teaching Montessori (hello!) and waxing nostalgic on my academic area, but swooning, swooning over my students. And the method. And the students!
When I taught high school, I kept a blog, called Sylvia Teaches, named for Plath, because she was my second literary love, right after Anne Frank, and it was supposed to be anonymous, but I was stupid and linked things like football game clips from the news and my students found it, and they said the sweetest things to me, which made me cry, but so did having my blog found. So I'm not anonymous here--I'm Molly, and I'm linking again with purpose--but I also want to be careful and respectful, so no photographs of faces or links to my actual school, and really mostly words, but sure, OK, some pictures too:
I am reading this book that is making my brain tick--it's telling stories, and I want to tell stories too. For me, this is the best kind of book, and I say this with full recognition of the selfishness inherent: I love to read books that make me want to write. That drive me to my notebook or my laptop, or wherever, and out it all comes in one heady plop, and in this way, I hope someone else wants to tell his or her story and it just wallops on down the line until we're all gathered together, marshmallows weeping from our twigs, and we're not in the least bit alone.
I want to tell you this story, today: I want to tell you about my first day back. My first day teaching full time again, because there was a big space between the last day teaching high school and my first day teaching Montessori. I did the grad student thing, in which I was a TA of sorts, and I adjuncted occasionally, and I teach online classes in poetry (coming up in October: The Poet in the Science Lab), and I want to tell you how I came to teach at this place--I can tell I'm gearing up for it, so I need to nip this in the bud. Let's just say there were many days between my last first day and this one.
I also have to say: my children attend the school where I teach.
So this particular first day was dark and stormy because this is how the second week of September rolls in Minnesota, apparently, and the clouds of rain were being challenged in gloom by the clouds of mosquitos. We decided, after I pinch hit for the elementary teacher the May previous and my son spent much of his mornings glued to my lap, that we would drop F off at the Children's House door and I would just skitter on over to my classroom and all would fall into this new rhythm.
But this was not, of course, the way it worked. Best laid plans.
Instead, F refused to enter his classroom. It was dark outside and the rooms of our school were lit up as they are at the holidays; it looked like fireplaces glowed inside. He followed my path through the halls out the windows, his hair plastered to his forehead, welts sprung across his forehead. His blood, my blood, is irresistible to those vampiric insects. We become miserable come thaw.
I stood in my carefully prepared room, that mythic environment we are meant to perfect as Montessori educators, and my son stood on the walk, his face turned to the sky, miserable and wailing, refusing entry to his own classroom.
So I did what I knew I had to do, and I ducked into a windowless portion of my neighbor's room, and I wept with him. I knew J would tell me exactly what I needed to hear to move back into my room with confidence and strength, to ease the terror I myself felt at My First Day Back, and she was gentle and firm, which is why I adore her--that, and she is a fierce protector of her own brood of painfully adorable toddlers--and she said to me, "Molly, this is a power struggle."
He was three, and he didn't have a lot of control over his life. His parents decided when he'd go to sleep, that he went to school, decided what was for dinner, decided when we'd visit his grandparents, if we'd get another pet (astonishingly more often yes than another, more sane counterpart might expect). He knows his mama, who started off as befuddled, eventually found kinship in attachment, but now was in the independence-touting Montessori mindset, which meant leaving F in the rain, purpling at the cold and the mosquitos, a stand-off that meant duel weeping.
After ten or fifteen minutes or so, he was coaxed in by the head of school, and our respective first days went off without further dramatic hitch. I have that wept face in the dark seared into my memory, though, but along with it, his confident stride, the one he took on Day 2, his little plant waggling in his arms, that march from mama's side to classroom door, our roads that diverge and converge continually, as they do when mama teaches two classrooms down.
When I taught high school, I kept a blog, called Sylvia Teaches, named for Plath, because she was my second literary love, right after Anne Frank, and it was supposed to be anonymous, but I was stupid and linked things like football game clips from the news and my students found it, and they said the sweetest things to me, which made me cry, but so did having my blog found. So I'm not anonymous here--I'm Molly, and I'm linking again with purpose--but I also want to be careful and respectful, so no photographs of faces or links to my actual school, and really mostly words, but sure, OK, some pictures too:
(We think this is a phoebe babe that toppled from its nest, but we could be wrong.
We put her back up immediately and mama came back. All is well in the mud-nest on our porch.)
We put her back up immediately and mama came back. All is well in the mud-nest on our porch.)
I am reading this book that is making my brain tick--it's telling stories, and I want to tell stories too. For me, this is the best kind of book, and I say this with full recognition of the selfishness inherent: I love to read books that make me want to write. That drive me to my notebook or my laptop, or wherever, and out it all comes in one heady plop, and in this way, I hope someone else wants to tell his or her story and it just wallops on down the line until we're all gathered together, marshmallows weeping from our twigs, and we're not in the least bit alone.
I want to tell you this story, today: I want to tell you about my first day back. My first day teaching full time again, because there was a big space between the last day teaching high school and my first day teaching Montessori. I did the grad student thing, in which I was a TA of sorts, and I adjuncted occasionally, and I teach online classes in poetry (coming up in October: The Poet in the Science Lab), and I want to tell you how I came to teach at this place--I can tell I'm gearing up for it, so I need to nip this in the bud. Let's just say there were many days between my last first day and this one.
I also have to say: my children attend the school where I teach.
So this particular first day was dark and stormy because this is how the second week of September rolls in Minnesota, apparently, and the clouds of rain were being challenged in gloom by the clouds of mosquitos. We decided, after I pinch hit for the elementary teacher the May previous and my son spent much of his mornings glued to my lap, that we would drop F off at the Children's House door and I would just skitter on over to my classroom and all would fall into this new rhythm.
But this was not, of course, the way it worked. Best laid plans.
Instead, F refused to enter his classroom. It was dark outside and the rooms of our school were lit up as they are at the holidays; it looked like fireplaces glowed inside. He followed my path through the halls out the windows, his hair plastered to his forehead, welts sprung across his forehead. His blood, my blood, is irresistible to those vampiric insects. We become miserable come thaw.
I stood in my carefully prepared room, that mythic environment we are meant to perfect as Montessori educators, and my son stood on the walk, his face turned to the sky, miserable and wailing, refusing entry to his own classroom.
So I did what I knew I had to do, and I ducked into a windowless portion of my neighbor's room, and I wept with him. I knew J would tell me exactly what I needed to hear to move back into my room with confidence and strength, to ease the terror I myself felt at My First Day Back, and she was gentle and firm, which is why I adore her--that, and she is a fierce protector of her own brood of painfully adorable toddlers--and she said to me, "Molly, this is a power struggle."
He was three, and he didn't have a lot of control over his life. His parents decided when he'd go to sleep, that he went to school, decided what was for dinner, decided when we'd visit his grandparents, if we'd get another pet (astonishingly more often yes than another, more sane counterpart might expect). He knows his mama, who started off as befuddled, eventually found kinship in attachment, but now was in the independence-touting Montessori mindset, which meant leaving F in the rain, purpling at the cold and the mosquitos, a stand-off that meant duel weeping.
After ten or fifteen minutes or so, he was coaxed in by the head of school, and our respective first days went off without further dramatic hitch. I have that wept face in the dark seared into my memory, though, but along with it, his confident stride, the one he took on Day 2, his little plant waggling in his arms, that march from mama's side to classroom door, our roads that diverge and converge continually, as they do when mama teaches two classrooms down.
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