First Day Chronicles 2.0

08.22.22

I never really did well on first days.

Today was the first day of being back to face-to-face classes since the COVID-19 pandemic started. Yesterday, I conditioned myself that I am beyond prepared for my first F2F class as a public school teacher.

I have never been more wrong.

Perhaps in this profession, there really is nothing that's certain. Even though I have quite prepared myself for this day, major bumps still rattled me.

Husband and I were too excited to go to school that we left home at 4AM. By 5AM, I was already at school. It was quite chilling to be the only one in the building while it's still dark. I was reminded of the ghost stories my colleagues told me, and I was literally trembling while opening the door to our Math Center. But my trembling quickly went away as I opened my bag to bring out my things, finding out that I left my phones at home! What a way to start the day! I am now devoid of any means of real-time communications with my heads, my colleagues, and my husband. Then I found out that I also left my masterlist of students at home, so I had to print another copy. But then I didn't have my phone and the center didn't have LAN or WiFi networks, and my files were saved in my cloud storage. I had to go down my classroom to connect to the LAN there, then go back up the center to print my masterlist. 

Then came my first period class. It was my advisory class. Things were actually going quite well until 7AM. My teacher's schedule indicates that by 7AM, there should already be another teacher taking over. 7:15 came and went, then 7:30, then 7:45, then 8:00. Since I have planned for activities that will last only for an hour, I was already quickly running out of ideas of what I will have my students do. Then I saw one of my co-teachers in the grade level, that's when she told me that we were actually supposed to stay in our advisory class until 9:00. Apparently it was announced through our faculty group chat, which I was not able to read since I f-cking left my phones at home. So of course, as a teacher, I needed to think quickly. Good thing I was able to come up with first day activities that could kill time without looking like I was only killing time.

Then, I went to my 2nd class for the day at 9AM. On the class program, my schedule for this class was only until 9:50AM. But we were having fun with the class introduction activities, perhaps too much fun, that we actually ran out of time. It was quite embarrassing that the next teacher had to literally call me out to tell me that she's supposed to go next.

Third class came and at least this one was quite an enjoyable class. However, there was just one tiny little hiccup: I forgot my "lines." While I was discussing my classroom rules, I had to pause for about 15 seconds to remember what I wanted to say. I then resorted to the classic TV commercial "Bawal ang pork..." but my students, being Gen Z, were not able to relate. 

Then I had my long break for an hour. By the last period, I was already  exhausted and dazed and confused. I entered the wrong f-ckng classroom. It was so awkward when the class's real teacher at that time knocked and asked, "Ma'am, may conflict po yata tayo sa schedule?" And when I checked mine, I realized I was supposed to be on the other side of the building. I apologized profusely to the teacher. It was a good thing that she was so understanding.

So there, no matter how much I prepared myself, I wasn't. 

I guess I'll just have to make it up for the rest of the school year.

*1st draft written on the 1st day of class. Got too tired to finish it within the week. 

They left... and it's great!

I keep seeing profile picture updates from my former [private school] students who transferred out to another school. Each time I do, my heart leaps a little leap of joy.

This is not to be vindictive against my former employers. It's just that I love these students so much that I want them to explore their full potentials outside their safest littlest comfort zone — the school they grew up in. On retrospect of my student life, I know full well how detrimental thriving in a small comfort zone is.

It's a law of physics, "an object at rest tends to stay at rest unless an outside force acts upon it." It's the same with people. We tend to stay in our comforting little bubbles, because there's no one challenging us from the inside. We tend to become little robots, following only what's the norm inside our safe havens. Then, the moment we are forced out of our comfort zone after eons of staying in it, we falter. We trip and we fall, not knowing how to walk on a field with a different gravity with the place we were so comfortable with.

We tend to be complacent with what we do, exerting only the bare minimum to "survive." We do not exert our maximum efforts, thinking that "Hey, I was able to pass this way before; it turned out fine." When we are comfortable, we tend to laze away with the mediocrity. Because we were already triumphant with our bare minimum, we repeatedly act at exceedingly comfortable levels that we so often give creativity up in exchange for compliance. Yet we get rewarded. We get lionized just because we completed our  tasks — tasks that were so routinely done. 

Inside our comfort zones, we risk the danger of losing our sense of self. The more we are challenged, the more we know about ourselves. We learn what makes us tick, what requires us to quit. We find out the full potential of what we can contribute to the world we live in. Lounging too much in our comfort zones kills most of our opportunities to unleash our full potentials.

My students left their comfort zones... and that is great! This is not to vilify those who stayed, that is also perfectly okay. I just wish for their personal growth though, that they continually find ways to push outside their bubbles little by little. I wish that they try to push the walls they, and their environment, have built around themselves. I wish that they continually expand their horizons, making their comfort zones bigger and bigger as they grow older. #