Getting Started

Unlike today, teachers weren’t expected to attend a week’s worth (or more) of pre-service training. I think there were a couple or three very casual days of meetings prior to school starting. However, the new kids (and there were four new English teachers that year) were expected to come in a week prior to that for district and/or building orientation.

But I was so excited that I showed up at Principal Richard Eichhorst’s office a week earlier even than that. I thought I’d check out my room, get the text books, start prepping, you know, teacher stuff.

Lena Dugan ushered me into his office where, blinking, he said, “You’re not supposed to be here ‘til next week.” I told him I knew that, but thought I’d at least get the textbooks I was going to use and check out my room.

With a noticeable lack of enthusiasm,  he walked me over to Room 200 (West Wing, southern corner, next to Bill Moody’s library office) and opened the door with his skeleton key. Apparently that room was being used as a “stuff repository” for anything and everything that arrived over the summer. Even then I knew I had no chance of ever winning any kind of “Best Room Decoration” prize, but clearly I wasn’t going to get much of a head start on overcoming what would be a career-long area of mediocrity. He did start to rip an old telephone cable off the wall -- but not completely, so it was kind of left hanging for maintenance to figure out. “We’re going to work on getting this stuff out of here,” he said.

Oh, okay, what about books I asked? They were upstairs (in the old library book room, where, according to legend, the previous librarian had refused to check out her books for fear students might lose them) but he said he didn’t know which ones I’d be using. “We’ll figure that out next week,” he said. We did (another story), but he wasn’t part of the we.

I returned home and tried, unsuccessfully (my legendary nervousness to begin every year is also another story for another time), to relax for another week. 

Note: Entries will not necessarily be in any kind of order, chronological or otherwise. Given the traffic generated just by the introduction, I’m just going to go with what’s ready!