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I have never started a school year with less idea about what I am going to teach. I have more of an idea of what I am going to do next year—in an admin job I don’t have at a school where I don’t work—than I have about this year.

 

(Also, turns out I’m pretty bad at tie-dying t-shirts.)

 

Nonetheless, there’s a certain magic to the first day of school. So magical, in fact, that after attending a NASCAR race in Tennessee a few years ago, I drove from Pigeon Forge, Tennessee to Des Moines, Iowa in a single day. I pulled into my driveway at roughly 4am, took a quick nap, and made it on time for the first day of school on Monday. 

 

“Why are you here?” the secretary asked. 

 

Honestly, how could I not? How could I miss the cacophony of kids streaming through the door trying to find their rooms? How could I miss the furious rush to decorate lockers before the bell rings? The sweet kindergartener who wandered into the wrong hallway and doesn’t yet know his teacher’s name (or his own)?

 

Every adult in the building is wearing t-shirts we tie-dyed together. As I stand here wearing the worst looking t-shirt in the building, I hear a chorus of teachers’ voices singing, “Welcome! We’re glad you’re here!” “Have a great first day!” “I’m so glad to see you!”

 

These aren’t Walmart associates harking the corporate line under penalty of death. No matter each student's past degree of pleasantness, we are genuinely glad they’re here today. We desperately want everyone to know this is a place where they can be themselves. We desperately want them to know we want the best for them. 

 

Actions mean more than words, and actions abound in each teacher’s room. They have lovingly decorated every desk, every tote, and every cubby with each student's name. Empty frames line the classroom wall, one for each student to proudly display their work. Each classroom has a decorative scheme unique to their teacher and their artistic sensibilities.💭 Laura tells me my decorative scheme is too distracting. I guess my artistic sensibilities are too middle-aged white male. Down the hallways, characters from all the kids’ favorite books proclaim how much they’ve missed them. Through these actions, the teachers tell the kids, “We’ve made this home for you.”

 

(I dare you to ask any teacher how much they’ve paid for these items out of their own pocket. That’s how important this is). 

 

Since I don’t have a homeroom, I wander the halls and greet as many kids as I can with a smile and a fist bump to deflect attention from my atrocity of a t-shirt. (My shirt looks more like it caught the back splatter of everyone else’s shirt than something I designed with intention.) Then, I join a classroom.

 

You see, there’s a moment at the beginning of the year. There’s a short window when the bell rings and you’ve greeted everyone at the door, and now they sit in front of you for the first time. In this short window, this class you don’t yet know can be anything. 

 

You dream all summer about the class going haywire. Mine usually begin mid-June, when I dream about kids coming through the door and I haven’t done my seating charts! I dreamed that my room was under construction and the computer lab had moved to a closet under the stairs in the band room. One year, when I was transitioning from middle school to elementary, I repeatedly dreamed that I was in my room with a lone second grader with whom I had absolutely no idea what to do. 

 

My wife, Laura, told me she had a recurring dream that her husband’s nightmares kept waking her up in the middle of the night. 

 

But teachers tend to be optimists, and we don’t want to believe the recurring dreams. No; on the first day of school, in those first few moments, the class that could be anything will be the most amazing, best class you’ve ever had, and reminds you of why you became a teacher in the first place:

 

To make a difference. 

 

That’s the ballgame. Go to any college in the country and ask the dwindling number of education majors why they’re there and they’ll tell you, “To make a difference.”

 

Fifty percent of new teachers leave the profession within five years. Like an insane version of Survivor: Teacher Edition, the system and the stresses weed out the youngbloods and pick off the twenty-somethings one-by-one. Less than half of the twenty-somethings will still be teachers in their fifties.💭 I currently work with 25 twenty-somethings, and 6 fifty-somethings, according to my unscientific guessing while looking at the staff list. Laura counts me in the 50+ group even though we're both in our 30s.

 

People enter this profession to make a difference. When they feel like they can’t make a difference, they leave. After going two or three years not feeling like the early mornings, late nights, stresses over behavior, endless PLC meetings, or dialing parent phone numbers with clammy palms actually made a difference… you leave. 

 

You need to see that you’re making a difference. The stresses of this job are absolutely untenable if you can’t.💭 Or of some rando blogger keeps drastically over-estimating your age. I know this because it happened to me three years ago.

 

On the first day of school last year, I walked a lost kindergartener named Aaron to one of the Kindergarten teachers (he didn’t know his teacher’s name yet). A few days later, Aaron came to find me.

 

“I just wanted you to know today’s my last day,” little Aaron told me. 

 

“Oh,” I replied. “Are you moving?”

 

Aaron just sighed. “No,” he said, shrugging. “I just don’t like it.”

 

And, just like that, young Aaron declared himself done with school! My boy Aaron is going to enjoy the rest of his life a free man! Leave it to the rest of these twats to sit in their desks and do their homework. No, sir. Aaron has retired to the easy life of video games and Fruit Loops and, bless his heart, he just had to come let me know because I was kind enough to take him to his class on the first day. 

 

Darn it, Aaron. I went through thirteen years of public school, four years of college, and fourteen more years of teaching while being in grad school roughly half that time. I wish I had known I could, at any point, just declare myself “done” like Michael Scott declared bankruptcy in The Office. 

 

Three years ago, that’s where I found myself. After eleven years of teaching middle school computer science in a district we’ll call Waving Grass, I had a tough time getting excited for any more. I was also a bit resentful, because the day I told my mom I was changing my major to education, she warned me I wasn’t going to like teaching the same thing year-after-year and darn it, Mom, why do you have to be right? 

 

I didn’t have to teach the same thing year-after-year; that was a grave I dug for myself under the false premise that by keeping my curriculum basically the same, I could perfect it. Much of the art of teaching is anticipation: the ability to predict where your students are going to struggle before they actually do, and then plan for it. 

 

Teaching will never be perfect. I know that now; I knew that then, and I hate it. 

 

My first few years teaching computer science, the problems and bugs the kids ran into weren’t just new to them, they were new to me. I love solving problems, and I loved digging into our code and figuring out things like: Why won’t the hippo jump over the unicorn on the moon? Why was the panda sinking through the floor when the code clearly says, “Stop on floor”? If I send this kid running down the hallway at a dead sprint, will the step counter accurately record their steps? Why, when you score a point, does it sometimes say “+0 Points,” and sometimes say “+9357 Points,” but will precisely never say “+1 Point”?💭 Laura likes to point out here that I didn't get married until I was 30.

 

There’s a scene in the movie Amadeus about the life of Mozart in which Mozart is dictating to Salieri a movement to his Requiem, and the complexity of it is so far over Salieri’s head that he simply doesn’t get it! Sometimes, I was afraid that I was doing that to my students, that the solutions I designed to the problems they had were so far over their head that they stood no hope of understanding it. But boy, did I like figuring those things out!,  💭 An astute teacher here would say, “The kids should be doing the problem-solving, not you.” Yes, except when delightfully-imaginative kids let their imagination far outpace their skill. In which case, bring it down to their Zone of Proximal Development to use an academic term for you, then let them take it back over. 💭 Also, congratulate them for not being afraid to go big, instead of encouraging them to make their project easier (more boring).

 

(Sometimes, I’m also afraid that I come across as too obtuse. I don’t know why.) 💭 I do know why. It's because I AM obtose. This is why I usually don't say much at faculty meetings.

 

But, by year ten, there was no problem the students experienced with their code that I hadn’t seen before. The art of problem-solving just wasn’t there for me. I was trying to teach kids how to problem-solve without having any problems of my own to solve. Sure, I had problems with them not turning things in, but that’s for another chapter. 

 

I could no longer see that I was making a difference. But my retirement is invested in the Iowa Public Employees Retirement System and Laura prohibits me from running for public office. And besides, I just can’t give up on teaching. 

 

To do something new, I spent the next year getting my Talented and Gifted endorsement. At the end of the year, though I didn’t really want to work in an elementary school, that’s the job that was offered to me, and so I took it. I left behind eleven years of tenure, know-how, friendships, and comfort at Waving Grass Middle School and went off to an elementary school an hour away in Tornado Alley, Iowa. 

 

Best professional decision of my life. 

 

Not that Waving Grass was terrible. It most certainly wasn’t! But when it came time that I had a job offer in my hands and I had to actually make the decision, Laura told me, “Waving Grass has been good to you, but you’re done growing there.”

 

In nature, anything that’s not growing is dying. She was right. The Alaskan Iditarod race runs a different route every year so the dogs don’t get too familiar with their route and stop listening to their musher. I needed a new race, a new mountain to climb. I found it at Tornado Alley. 

 

My second first year of teaching pushed me far outside my comfort zone. I had to learn terms like phonemic awareness and the box model of multiplication. Since I was teaching the advanced kids, I had to learn quickly what it meant to be advanced in elementary school. 

 

In my desk during the first week of school, I found a manual for the Iowa Acceleration Scale. This is a guide used around the country to determine if early grade promotion is appropriate for an advanced student. I feel like such an important and universal tool should have been a part of my TAG education… So why was I just now learning that it exists?

 

Why was I just now learning that one of the biggest research centers of Talented and Gifted education was here at the University of Iowa?

 

The thought hit me: how much more do I not know?

 

I had the dream again, the one with the second grader I had no idea what to do with. It would only be days before I actually had second graders in my room. 

 

This year, I kept my lesson plans in a 4x7 grid in a Google Doc bookmarked in my bookmarks toolbar. 

 

Week of:_________________
	Math	Reading	Social/Emotional
5th
4th
3rd
2nd
1st
Kinder

 

 

This table haunted my dreams my entire first year. I am not exaggerating or speaking in hyperbole. I vividly dreamed about this table growing legs and dancing through all my other dreams while Laura and I were on an anniversary trip to a riverside cabin in Pella. 

 

It was empty, and it taunted me with its emptiness. To do my job well, it needed to be filled in. And this evil, semi-translucent spreadsheet devoid of lesson plans danced through my dreams to mock me for how little I knew about elementary education. 

 

I taught computer science to my 5th graders. It was my only source of professional comfort. 

 

With lots of learning to do, I embedded myself into as many other classrooms as I could. I needed to see how these teachers taught math. Aside from being totally in awe of my new colleagues, I was able to see in action things I had only learned about. I was a social studies education major; I never learned how to teach math! It was my amazing new colleagues who taught me. Rapidly. 

 

Some theory:

 

In the last thirty years since I was in elementary school, math education has shifted from teaching a procedural understanding to a conceptual understanding. Not just understanding the steps to do multiplication, but also understanding why those steps work. Not just how to do division, but why do you need to do division here? I was taught to be a line cook; these kids are taught to be chefs.💭 This is what non-educators call, "The new math I don't like."

 

While I was leaning down to help one particular first grader, he turned, looked right at me, and shouted to my face, “I DON’T LIKE YOU!”

 

Thanks, kid. We just met. I’m nice. I promise. Have you met my friend Aaron? He has a plan for people who don’t like school. 

 

When my own 4th and 5th graders began coming into my TAG classes for the first time, boy was that an adjustment–for them and for me. I was certainly different from my predecessor, Mr. Roberts. Sure, I wanted to have fun, but long-term projects were my jam. 

 

Over the course of that year, we learned how to calculate scale and proportions and build paper scale models of landmarks; we wrote a magazine where the young journalists had to conduct in-person interviews with experts; we learned basic algebra; we held a series of mock trials. I thought it was amazing!

 

But, more than once,💭 ...per week or so... I heard, “I wish we had Mr. Roberts back.” A first grader broke down crying when I didn’t pass out candy. When I explained that I didn’t have any, he pointed to the cabinet where Mr. Roberts kept it and wailed, “It’s in there!” while tears streamed from his eyes. 

 

Maybe coming to Tornado Alley Elementary was a mistake. I was bored at Waving Grass, but at least I knew what I was doing. I bonded with the fresh college graduates in what I called my “second first year of teaching.”

 

But now, my third year at Tornado Alley, I get to spend my last day before school reflecting on the last two. I get to think of moments when a kindergartener gets off the bus every day and points to himself, as if to ask, “Can I come today?”

 

I get to think of moments like when a second grader walked into my room while I was at my desk working, whispered, “I’m not here, you don’t see me, nothing’s happening,” slipped a note under my desk, and ran away like a spy. The note said, I love coming to your class. 

 

I get to think of dish soap. My classroom candy of choice is fruity tootsie rolls,💭 I quickly learned that not having classroom candy is a big strike against you in the “Do the kids like you?” department, even though I had previously committed to not offering candy as a reward. You can hate me, but not any more than I hate myself for being a sellout. which I store in a Cascade dishwasher pods box that was too nice and durable to simply throw away. When the second grade classes practiced writing letters, I got a dozen that asked, “Dear Mr. Dubzacezizcaczk, Can I have some dish soap?” I sincerely hope these letters thoroughly confused their teachers. 

 

I get to think of a first grader who once proudly showed me his Mickey Mouse shirt, and was so impressed by my subsequent Mickey Mouse vocal impression that he brought all of his friends down so I could do it for them, too. 

 

I get to think of a lesson I taught in all the K-3 rooms that I started by doing a magic trick. Little did I know, once you have done one magic trick, you are now the school’s resident magician. 

 

I get to think of an incoming fourth grader, who during last year’s fiction writing unit, absorbed every word I had to say about The Hero’s Journey like I was Yoda… and proceeded to write a short story in which the hero’s lesson surprised even me. 

 

His hero spent their whole life searching for a magic weapon, only to realize he didn’t need it because the magic was within him the whole time. 

 

That stabbed me right in the heartstrings in the best way possible. I made sure to tell him he could be a writer someday. He needed to hear he was good at something from someone who meant it. He spent his first two days of school this year bugging his teacher non-stop about when he’d get to come to my room. 

 

Things are different when you’re making a difference. 

 

Last night, at open house, two incoming third grade girls walked by me, laughing and having a good time while eating their dilly bars. I became enraged with fake jealousy and asked them, “Where’s mine?”

 

They looked me straight in the eye, and with a load of sass, said, “We didn’t bring you one!” and then unapologetically walked away. 

 

A few minutes later,💭 If there’s one thing I don’t understand, it’s how anyone can take longer than thirty seconds to eat a dilly bar or any sort of ice cream treat. they came back, still giggling at whatever third - grade - going - on - sophomore girls laugh about, when one of them lost a piece of her dilly bar on the floor right in front of me. 

 

She looked up at me with wide eyes, and I flatly said, “That’s the piece you were gonna give me, wasn’t it?”

 

They looked at each other, laughed, and said, “Yep!” before turning and skipping down the hall. 

 

“Don’t worry, I’ll clean it up!” I shouted sarcastically as they skipped down the hall licking what was left of their dilly bars. 

 

They kept skipping. “See, he’ll clean it up,” I heard one of them say as I went back to my room to get some paper towels. 

 

“Tools!” Laura exclaimed when I told her this story. 

 

Oh, and Aaron came by to tell me he likes school now. What a difference. 

 

This year, because of some much-needed changes in the structure of our special programs, I have no lessons planned until we get into our first round of assessments and I find out what the students need. It’s a welcome change, and it means my program isn’t something extra, but embedded within the experience they’re already getting. I’ve been pushing for this for two years. 

 

Because of this, I have never started a school year with less idea of what I’m going to teach.

 

But that just means my last school year can still be anything, and every moment is still a chance to make a difference. 

 

______________________

David Dubczak is an educator and writer documenting his final year in the classroom before transitioning into school administration. Follow David Dubczak - Writer on Facebook to keep up with semi-weekly posts. 

 

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Read David's books and plays right here at www.DavidDWriter.com. Since I'm a nerd, I've written a lot (but not exclusively) about ships. 

 

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