on the cover / By Jim Hight

Teacher’s Prep — Knuckling down for a hectic nine months as the school year starts

(Aug. 23, 2007)  Whether welcomed or dreaded, the inevitable return to school arrives next week for thousands of elementary, middle and high school students in Humboldt County.

As they approach their first day of class, many kindergarteners and students graduating to middle or high school will surely be anxious about fitting in and finding the bathrooms. For older students, disappointment over the end of summer may compete with excitement about sports, dating prospects and even learning. And some students will be looking forward to the routine and safety of school as a respite from homes that provide too little of either.

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Parents will be going through their own emotions: the stress of buying school clothes and supplies; sharing their children’s anxieties over new schools and new teachers; not to mention their own sense of impending freedom — perhaps mixed with loneliness — as children who have been around 24/7 return to the care of schools for six hours every weekday.

But what about teachers? What do they go through? How do they prepare? What do they look forward to and what do they worry about?

To find out, I spoke with three Humboldt County teachers, two veterans with 20 years or more in the classroom and one new teacher entering her third year of full-time teaching. They shared intimate details of their back-to-school rituals, the practical aspects, the emotions and even their first-day-of-school nightmares. They opened up about what it is that keeps them going through the school year: the weekends spent correcting papers; the nights spent planning activities; the sheer intensity of leading, managing and teaching 20 to 30 children five days a week.

A common theme was their sense that during the school year, there are no slack times. “You could literally work 24 hours a day and not run out of stuff to do,” says Warren Blinn, a fifth-grade teacher at Alice Birney Elementary in Eureka. “Your work’s never done,” agrees Lisa Cardenas who teaches a Spanish immersion class at McKinleyville’s Morris Elementary.

But all three said that the stressful demands of their jobs are more than compensated for by the nourishing joy of their daily interactions with students. “There are a lot of sweethearts that sit in those seats,” says Pam Halstead of Fortuna High.

Right: Fortuna High’s Pam Halstead gets very excited about the first day of school: “Kind of like right before a performance, it’s thrilling.” Photo by David Lawlor.

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