A nervous energy fills every member of the school community before the start of the new year. A teacher in the Open Classroom is no exception. Can I do this? Am I prepared? Is the room alright? Judy’s room looks perfect. Mine doesn’t.
I taught different combos of first, second, third and fourth grade in the San Geronimo Open Classroom for thirty years. And those first day feelings never went away.
Then came the late August day the students poured off of the playground and through the door to start school. Luckily, some of them had been in my room the year before. The old vets helped the new students find their cubbies and places. Quickly, they sat down in a circle for the first morning meeting of the new year. Happy, sometimes nervous, young faces looked up expectantly or turned and gabbed with an old friend sitting next to them. And suddenly I felt at home. Most of them did too.
I started the first meeting with a reading of Dr. Seuss’ Oh the Places You’ll Go. A tradition copied from John Kaufman, the oldest students’ teacher. Then we discussed the question: Are you Nervous Today? Most students said, yes. But I remember one first grader sitting next to me with her preschool sister in her lap. The year before she had struggled with her transition to school. But today she announced to the class that she “was whatever was most opposite of nervous.” Then she turned to her mom and said, “You can go now.”
But not all parents left. They were there to coop, sometimes bringing a project from home. Usually anchoring core small group lessons that were introduced at the meeting.
Sometimes parents hung out at the meeting on the morning of their child’s birthday. They wanted to hear the birthday song. I believe Rebecca Braun was the first teacher to sing, Happy Birthday We Love You. One class would start and then the song would ring out from classroom to classroom.
A strong connection between home and school is the backbone of Open. Conflict resolution and emotional support of a student or students at the start of school day pulled me out of more than one meeting. Luckily, Marlene, Judy or Sandy, the k-1 teachers at various times, would take all my students into their meeting, or a super co-opting parent ran the meeting in my place while I worked with the emotional students.
A few of these problems children faced were quite tragic. And others, though not tragic sounding to us, were nonetheless dramatic for the students. I remember working with two very upset girls because one insisted as they entered school that Miley Cyrus and Hannah Montana were the same person and the other vehemently disagreed.
Morning meeting often featured visits and mini lessons from the official art room teachers like Amy, Kristy, Molly, Anita, Lanee or awesome art room cooping parents, or lessons from garden teachers like Josh or Gina. Then there would be classroom discussion of jobs and choices, what students, teachers and parents would be doing that morning, ending with dismissal into the day.
But the day was not locked in stone before or during those meetings. Sometimes our whole morning plan changed because someone saw salmon in the school creek on the way to school. Or sometimes the art room project discussed was so inspiring that the morning shifted to a day revolving around artistic pursuit. And sometimes a project in another room captured the day. Like the morning John invited us to watch him try to feed a rat to his snake. After a riveting drama complete with a crowbar rescue of the snake, the rat survived with one eye and became a classroom pet nicknamed Lucky.
The parents, the students and I were so ‘lucky’ to have those morning meetings filled with sharings from home, songs, visits from other rooms and issues to discuss from our wider and smaller world. We all learned so much from each other in that short half hour/ forty-five minutes. And boy did we have fun