BACK TO SCHOOL

"Won't you take me back to school?
I need to learn the golden rule..."

The Voice, The Moody Blues

It may sound odd as a teacher to say that I love back-to-school time, but in a lot of ways, it's like being a kid again.

(It's especially better now because I don't have to go back early for band practice anymore. I'll get back to that.)

I loved back-to-school time, mainly because of school supplies. There's nothing cooler than opening a brand new spiral notebook with a really cool picture on the cover. Even one that DOESN'T have a cool picture on the cover. New pencils and pens in all different colors. (Purple especially. I have a lot of old notebooks that bleed purple ink.) Folders and binders and calendars. And then they started making paper clips and binder clips in different colors. Wow. Glue and scissors and pencil boxes and crayons. Oh yeah-that new box of crayons. All 64 colors. Isn't there one now that has 108? I think we were gypped-kids have all kinds of cool stuff now.

I couldn't wait to buy all my stuff for the new school year. Even in high school. And college was fun, too. I didn't even mind buying books. I do NOW, but I wasn't paying for them in my undergrad years. (Thanks, Mom & Dad!) Selling them back was quite beneficial. I think I bought lawn furniture one summer.

Nowadays, we have big superstores FULL of school supplies. A far cry from the little stationery stores that reeked of ink. Staples has become my favorite. Not only because they have all that cool paper stuff, but they have cool gadgets, too. Technology hasn't taken too much fun out of the pen and paper racket. It's like a bonus.

One of the cool things about being a teacher is that I can get school supplies for free. (Sort of.) I go to the supply closet...and shop. I first experienced this when I worked as a file clerk in Little Rock and got to dig around in the supply room. Then when I started teaching in McGehee, they gave us a whole box of stuff at the first of each year. In Los Alamos, the foreign language department had its own supply closet, and it happened to be at the back of my classroom the second year I was there. In Sanford, everything was in the high school secretary's office. At CCCUA they give us a bag full of overstock stuff. I have A LOT of paper clips now. And correction tape. Does anybody still use that?

Now to the social aspect of back-to-school. You have to determine your LOOK for the first day. I still do this, even though I may not see a SOUL on my first day back, since in-service seems to fall on the SECOND day now. It's still very important though, because it's your first appearance since last May and everyone wants to see how you've changed over the summer. Did somebody cut their hair? Grow it out? Color it? Did they eat too much or do they look anorexic? Did they get too much sun or not enough? (I would fall under the "not enough" category. But as I age, that's not a bad thing.)

Regarding hair, I was usually trying to grow mine back out, because I had a bowl cut for years. Sometimes I couldn't decide-long or short? Long won out for a long time after the metal years. Perms were an option, too, but
that's gone the way of the dinosaur because I'm just not paying that much for one anymore. Then I discovered Clairol.

Before I started my junior year in high school, I colored my hair for the first time. Semi-permanent Loving Care, Medium Ash Brown. Mom said it would make my hair black. And it did. We'll blame Nikki Sixx for that. I still have the Motley Crue picture that prompted that move. It was out of an all-Crue copy of...Tiger Beat or something. It was 1985, so presenting my newly discovered metalhead personality was priority. I wore jeans and a red shirt with funky black designs on it. I don't think I had my purple Converse All-Stars yet. Needless to say, I really didn't shock anybody.

Clothes shopping was (still is) always fun for back-to-school, and you had to stragtegically plan your wardrobe. In 1988, when I started my sophomore year at HSU, on the first day of marching band practice with the brand new
band director, I wore a cut-up Guns N' Roses t-shirt: black, a skull, wrapped with roses and gun barrels poking out of the eye holes on the front. I wanted to walk up to freshman and say "You know where you are? You're in the jungle, baby. You're gonna die!!"

I never actually did that, but I was just happy I wasn't want of them. Regardless of whether I said it or not, they still thought I was kinda scary. "Freaky rocker chick" became my persona for several years.

And...that hasn't changed much, I don't think. Did I mind? Eh...not so much.

MY students don't know that, though. They see hardcore evil professor the first day. I ALWAYS wear black on the Day 1. I did when I taught high school and I still do it now. And as a college instructor, you have to have TWO black outfits: One for Monday/Wednesday class, and another for Tuesday/Thursday class. I was told years ago in my education prep classes, during the "how to dress for success" sessions, that black was a color of power.

Think Darth Vader. Johnny Cash. Boris Badenov. It seems to work.

Sometimes I'll skip my contacts and throw on the glasses for more severity. On occasion, I'll pull the hair up. I don't smile much. (I was once told not to smile until Christmas, but I don't always follow that.) I talk really fast. I want students to walk out of that first class meeting absolutely terrified. It's always interesting to see who comes back the next time. Honestly, I don't think I've ever really scared anybody.

This is more difficult to do with online classes because they don't see me, but the better Blackboard gets, that may all change someday.

The freaky rocker chick persona is now reserved for shows. Students never see this, unless they are brave enough to come see the band, and I do invite them on a regular basis. Then they go, "WTH?"

One of my colleagues, who was listening to students complain about how much work they had to do in both the Fine Arts classes, said, "You have an art teacher who still paints and sculpts, and a music teacher who still performs regularly. You don't know how lucky you are that they're still 'in-action'."

Ha ha HA!!!

I covered school supplies. I've covered clothing and appearance. So...now what?

Oh, the idea that it's all NEW. New school year. Meet new people. Try new things. Experience new situations. That's why I always enjoyed starting a new school year. I'd have new teachers, I'd learn new stuff. I'd meet new
people, (even though that's not my strong suit, meeting new people), but I could make new friends. I grew up in one place, never changed schools. I saw the same people every year from K through 12. So, maybe someone would
come from a really cool place and that might expand my view of the world.

We always learned a new halftime show in marching band. I don't miss marching AT ALL, but it was fun to learn new music and new drills, which really weren't that new because Mena didn't do corps style marching. Mr. Gray rotated 4 to 5 military, 6 to 5 marching band shows throughout the years so no one class ever marched the same show twice. So, in a way, it WAS a new show every year.

Being one of those annoying academic overachievers, I looked forward to new classes, like Journalism, Advanced History, and Music Theory. I'm talking high school here, but even as a little kid in elementary and middle school I was the same. To finally learn to write in cursive in the 3rd grade. (I don't think they teach that anymore either. Have you seen some of this younger generation's handwriting??) To learn science in a REAL lab. (Although I was sick on earthworm dissection day in 7th grade.) I thought it was cool to FINALLY meet those teachers everybody was always warning us about. And they weren't that scary, after all.

I always had personal goals, too. To be more social, more this or less that. In my college years, I was concerned about trying not to get sloppy. Not that I went to class in my pajamas like students do nowadays, but I'd skip the make-up and hair and throw on whatever was available as long as it was clean. I do remember those times when all my casual clothes were dirty and only my dress clothes were clean, so I'd end up having to "dress up" for class. Then everyone would ask, "What are you all dressed up for?" I saw this happen to other people so it was nice to know I wasn't alone.

As a high school teacher, I always looked forward to fixing up my classroom. Putting up new posters and whatnot. Reorganzing my vast amount of junk or moving my desk around. This isn't much different in the higher ed area, though I can't move my desk as easily anymore because it's this huge cockpit monstrosity that only fits in one of two corners in my office and I refuse to sit with my back to the door. I don't have a classroom to decorate, so I spend time trying to fix what didn't work lesson-wise the year before. This is why I adopt a new textbook every 3 or 4 years because for a while there I got stuck in a rut. I taught the same two classes for about 5 semesters and I got sooooo bored I had instructional mono. Talking about the same crap over and over again twice a week.

That's what's so cool about collge teaching. I can choose when my classes are scheduled. I can decide what books and supplies I want to use. And since I am the only one who teaches my subjects, I don't answer to anybody but me. And the Humanities dean, of course. I just created my own custom textbook from an online service and hopefully it will save my students SOME money. After having to buy books for myself again for PhD classes, I thought, "This crap is so overpriced." I'm paying $125 for a book that cost about $5 dollars to manufacture, so screw that. So much other stuff is available online so my job is getting almost too easy.

Shh!!! Don't tell anybody!!

I'm excited about this semester not only because of the new music book, but because of my new Spanish program. Totally online and interactive. I'll never have to grade another oral assignment ever again. (Knock on wood.) Those will grade themselves. This thing has a voice recognition feature that actually says, "I didn't understand you." When you pronounce things correctly, all the words turn green. ¡Qué bueno!

I just hope students will be able to navigate it. I had to be trained for it, so if I can follow arrows and see flashing lights, they should be able to figure it out.

I think I have the music issue straightened out, too, as long, as students have decent computers. Everything will be mp3s online and they don't even have to download them if they don't want to. They can just go online and
listen. Having YouTube through Blackboard has helped. I didn't hear a lot of bitching about it last summer, so I guess that was a success.

So. School is back in session. I have a couple of new ensembles I can throw on. I did get out the hair color again. Auburn this time. Elvira Halloween Black doesn't really suit anymore. (It didn't in the 80s either, but oh well.) I got my school supply goodie bag at in-service. More correction tape. Yippee!!! I'll be using that a lot. ALL of my classes made. The AC is fixed in my office and I don't have to drive to Nashville. I get to zip around on campus in my groovy little car and foreign language software and audio/visual technology has made life really good.

Here's to Fall 2010!

Source: http://moremsmacblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/back-to-school.html