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My 6th First Day of School: A Story
By ramillerb | September 27, 2008
I know most schools have already started, but I wanted to share a “back to school” experience I had as a new student. Even though I was a veteran mover (we moved 7 times before I was 16), each new school was a gauntlet all its own…. I can remember elbows, and bulging Esprit bags checking my face, my hips, and most of all, I remember a bouffant blond, her breath laced with spearmint gum. I was going the wrong way down a one-way hallway in my new school. It was 8thgrade, it was humid out, (which meant icicles were forming on air conditioned desks inside) and I was in an anonymous suburb of Houston, TX. The teacher who lived beneath the blond hair scolded me with a raspy voice as she yanked me out of the stream of traffic and over to a side hall. I tried to explain to her that I was new and I didn’t know where my 1stperiod was. She rolled her eyes as tightly as she could towards her skull and said, “Well, you’re just gonna have to learn how to survive in this school, now aren’t ya honey?” With that she about faced me with the warmth of a warden and shoved me into the appropriate direction.
After a quiet lunch alone, I eschewed my social skills for trust that my outfit could be a better mouthpiece. I found levitation in that fact that my nylons matched the tan on my arms, and my green skirt echoed hues in my shirt and my bag. This was enough to float me from the lunchroom to my 5th period class. I arrived late and knocked on the door until it parted to show 3 long rows of desks that looked measured out by a ruler. All heads were down at 90-degree angles to paper, and students wrote robotically. The woman at the front of the class barely moved, but I recognized the tuck of her curls and the Technicolor blond hues. “Well,” she said, “Look who decided to show up to class”.
I was ordered to take a seat. She picked up the lesson where she left off, so I rummaged through my bag for a pen, my only pen. Proudly I lifted it to the paper, and with ease began taking notes while a Styrofoam shark bisected by an inner tube connected by a precarious wire, bobbled on the end. Had I been given just a hint of a small piece of a guide to navigating this school, how my Pacific Northwesterly ways might have been tempered a bit to avoid certain misfortune, I might not have dared enter this pen into the Lone Star school system.
Aware of my new audience, I squinted at the board, wrote, squinted more in fake concentration, and contemplated bolting to the door, and then looked through the edges of my lashes as I set the pen down. I knew the pen was a risky move, but how else was I to communicate my humorous interests and unique worth?
It wasn’t long before the pen was in enemy hands, and enemy laps where my hands couldn’t go. I patted my head feverishly and gave me large, unruly hair a scootch off my neck. Too unsteady to see the pen’s travels, I checked my gag reflexes and a list of excuses to get out of class the fastest i.e.: diarrhea and projectile vomiting. With my “getting off on the right foot” status already at an all-time low, even for me, I raised my hand to call more attention to myself.
A cry of awwws, rippled across the room. Clearly I was ruining the newest joke. The teacher jutted her chin toward me just as the pen was replaced. She lumbered over to my saucered eyes and picked it off my desk. Is this how I wanted to start the first day? Umm, not really. Did she need to take the pen from me? Oooh no, oooh, well, OK, I guess you can keep it. My lightness had anchored.
*****I don’t usually end my stories with this sort of wrap up, but since this is a blog post, I have some more to say on this topic of being a new kid in school and relocating. I wish there had been someone to help me then. I hate to look back on these situations and not see the elements of humor from afar, because that’s the way I wish I had been trained to deal with them. Instead, I internalized everything which caused anxiety, undue fear, and unrealistic rationalizations of normal situations that most kids go through.
This compounded with a constantly changing set of environs caused me to have trouble putting faith in my abilities, and focus on academics. Because I left a lot of this untreated, I experienced physical problems such as muscle pain and digestive issues that have followed me somewhat into my adulthood.
I think every kid deserves to be welcomed into a new school in a much different way. They deserve to feel internally safe and to have training and services available if they don’t feel that way. I think of the kids who are now relocating who not only have a social barrier, but a language barrier. How are their insides? Are they a mess? Does anyone ask them? Do they know how to feel better in there so they can do better out there? I wonder if lots of kids have this problem. My wish is to help strengthen girls’ and boys’ insides so that they can deal with the outside pressures.
Teach them to support instead of compete. And if there needs to be competition, make it healthy and teach them how to be amazing losers, beautiful losers. I believe that kids in essence are good and want to be good to one another. Yet sometimes our societal pressures and systems hinder their ability to be good to one another, and thus make it tougher for teachers to manage classrooms and serve such a diverse population of personalities. No one really knew what I was going through because I didn’t say anything about it. I just pushed it down further. If you are reading this post and you want to add to this conversation, please do. I am also interested in putting together a guide for kids and parents who are relocating. Sort of a survival guide. This may start as a blog and go to a book. If you have interest in this topic or experience, I would love to hear from you. I’m at ramillerb@hotmail.com.
Topics: BACK TO SCHOOL |