My first teaching job...baptism by fire!!

Nothing new to write about, so a little bit of reminiscing... a scenario from 1972...

My good friend Janet and I went to high school and college together, and never thought for a moment that we would get teaching jobs in the same school. But we did!! After subbing from Sept through March, I was hired to teach kindergarten: AM class of 28 live wires and a PM class of about 18 quiet, calm kids. Probably because most of them didn't speak English!!! And I didn't speak Spanish!! Oh well, thankfully, there was a little bilingual girl who was a very good translator and saved the day most of the time.

Janet had been hired to go into an existing 3rd grade whose numbers had crested over the magic number which then required two teachers, and so she was to team teach with the other teacher.

There were many interesting happenings in the short 4 months that we worked together. It was an inner city school, and the staff and children were mostly Hispanic and/or children of color. That made the two of us [the 2 newest teachers] kind of stand out a little bit. However, we could never understand why the principal couldn't tell us apart. We were beginning to think that we should wear name tags. We decided that it would make little difference after the principal called Janet to substitute teach on a day when Janet was already a hired staff member. The following year there was a first grade position, and a team- teaching 4th grade position. I was given the 4th grade team- teaching position, and twin Janet was assigned the solo first grade.

When discussing it with the principal, she said to me, " Well, I don't think that you could handle a class on your own. You had some trouble this past year in 4th grade, and that was with another teacher in the room, too."
Well, hellllloooo! I was the kindergarten teacher!!![Who orchestrated the first ever kindergarten graduation with gowns made by the Home Economics classes in the high school.] I remember 2 things about this day. The children on the left of the aisle[the AM class] and the children on the right side[ the PM class] stood up and faced the audience ready to begin their songs that they had practiced for the occasion. I gave them the signal, and watching me...they began, and then we all learned what a 'round' was ...because one side got ahead of the other side by a whole line!!!. They had never practiced together , and the good news was that the audience liked it. The fact remained that they were very entertaining, and cute, too.

The other thing I remember: The principal, in an effort to encourage the parents to keep the kids in school, and to stress how important an education was to succeed in life...said, "For some of these children, this is the only graduation that they will ever have in their lives."

{How sad. And yet, from my year's experience [both substitute teaching and having a classroom of my own], I understood it.

The following year, Janet and I were split up when every classroom in the building was relocated to any building in the [big] district that had a spare classroom as a result of...the fire that broke out in the middle of the night[ electrical fire, we were told] and burned the school down. Whew!! It was not a happy scene that morning as we arrived, and were rerouted off the main street. We saw the smoke in the distance and then turned to look at each other..."You don't suppose that the school's on fire, do you?

Each September after that year, I told my students that I took fire drills very seriously because my first school burned down. The result of that statement?

Wide eyed ...and suddenly attentive!!!!