The first real teaching job that I got started as someone else's 1 year leave of absence. I was given a classroom in an elementary school with children labeled "Mentally Retarded". There were 9 little ones from grade Kindergarten to Grade 3.
It started out like this...
"Here's your room. Here's the key. Let me know if you need anything!
Ok, then!
I started by moving some furniture around and making my first ever bulletin board. I cut out something that looked a bit like a tree branch...I should have taken a picture! Remember that in life. You're going to wish you had pictures of everything!
I think I titled the board "Reaching Out to a New Year"! Or something like that.
After I felt like the room looked passable, I opened a file cabinet...and oh my god!
No files!
But PILES!
Piles of faded blue mimeographed sheets of paper with anything from coloring book pages to simple math problems in pica type. (There's some vocabulary to look up: mimeographed and pica)
Drawer after drawer...Stack after stack!
The kids were coming in two days! Wait! What kids? Did I have a class list? Did I have some form of information about who they were or what they needed? Oh well, I was sure someone would tell me when I needed to know!
For now, I was excited! I had a classroom. I had a bulletin board up that I had designed myself! And...I had an empty box that I could use to carry home one file drawer of paper stacks!
Life was good! Ahh...my first real teaching job!
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