day one

Dear Desert Dame,

I have cut out roughly 45982374 tiny shapes from construction paper today. My right hand is no longer functioning. I severely underestimated how much preschool teachers need strong scissor wielding skills. It’s resume-worthy, really.

The babies kiddos students come tomorrow for their first day of school. EVER. I’ve spend the last two days prepping the classroom; cleaning, organizing, sanitizing, cutting, hanging, decorating. Somewhere between getting a Fantastic-induced (seriously, this stuff is terrible) headache and reading about separation anxiety, I made this connection which had for some reason gone grossly overlooked. We will be starting from scratch in this classroom, how perfectly terrifying! Everything from hand-raising to chair-sitting to quiet-being, letters, shapes, patterns, sounds, all of it, potentially brand new to them! In this moment of fatigued revelation I think quietly, “OMG WHAT AM I DOING.”

Here I am, with 22 little souls ready to march into my classroom tomorrow with their new shoes and socks and lunchboxes filled with organic milk and gluten-free cookies! How on earth does this work? They’re gonna be walking out of this classroom at the end of the year able to write? READ? I don’t believe it.

And then my bleach-soaked brain wandered to you. You’ve had day one already. You’re in school to be the teacher’s teacher! You’re preparing to be the master, the DOCTOR of something. I have to know; how is it going?