First day jitters

One day of the '08/'09 school year is now under my belt, and another exciting nine months begins!

I actually woke up at 4:30 this morning and took a walk around my neighborhood before getting ready to go to school. I also had a dream last night where I had gotten out of bed, looked out my window, washed my hands, and headed back to the bed -- only it turns out I had never gotten out of bed in the first place! Analyze THAT, Sigmund Freud!

All weekend long, I had been dreading my early morning crosswalk duty. The city of Dallas has been doing some construction on the street that my school is on, and part of one lane is cordoned off, which requires people in that lane to pull into the opposing traffic lane to get past it. But picture of this situation could appear in any dictionary under the word, "bottleneck."

Amazingly, there didn't seem to be any bottlenecking this morning. There was a police man in the area keeping an eye on things, but he wasn't directing traffic around the obstacle. People just seem to take their turns and work around it. Impressive, to say the least!

During morning duty, I saw lots of my kids from last year, and now that I'm not their teacher anymore, I can pal around with them quite a bit more. I also saw several kids that were familiar from parent drop-off last year who walked past me and informed me that they would be in my class THIS year.

As is always the case on the first day of school, there was mass chaos at first, with all of the parents and kids trying to figure out where to go. Nobody was actually in the classroom before 8:30.

A few quick hits about my class this year:

A lot more kids should be showing up soon, because I only had 11 kids in my homeroom and eight kids in my second class.

Those eight kids in the afternoon were very well behaved, but it was like pulling teeth getting them to answer ANY of my questions.

Some of my kids are either VERY shy on the first day of school, or they are very low mathematically, because when I asked them what eleven minus five was, they stared blankly at me like I had just asked them to spell the rising agricultural capital of central Micronesia.

The mother of one of my homeroom kids talked with me briefly this morning about how her son is "severely ADHD," and how she had just taken him off of his medication. I can't really blame her too much, because she said that the medication had basically turned her son into a zombie. But I hope that she's working closely with a doctor somewhere to find a comfortable middle ground.

One girl seemed obsessed with my hair. When she came into my class, the very first thing she said was, "I really like your hair." Later, while staring at it, she asked if it felt hard or soft, and asked how I got it to stay like that. Just your run-of-the-mill hair gel. I'm not sporting a fauxhawk or anything...

While discussing safety in science, one boy told me that you should wear safety goggles while "mixing potions" so they don't splash into your eyes. I was so tempted to say, "50 points for Slytherin!!"

While discussing a word problem that required subtraction to find a solution, potions boy also told me that he thought we should add on that problem because, "adding is good, and sometimes subtracting is not good."

Oh, and I have FOUR girls in my classes with the same name.

All in all, a pretty good first day! I would absolutely LOVE to keep my class size as small as it was today, but I know it will increase in the next couple of days.

So, how did everyone else's first day go??