Do it the right way, not the Wong way.

This morning's e-mail included one of Teacher Magazine's periodic e-mail updates, and among the new content on the website is this Teacher Leaders Network post about the first days of school. Most of the points, for someone who is brand new to teaching, or to a building, are pretty solid: know what the procedures for your building are, see how much you can find out about students (i.e., what students have IEPs and what you need to look out for regarding IEPs), but I got totally turned off by the last paragraph:

One final tip for now: I’d be surprised to learn that there is a new teacher in America who hasn’t come across Harry and Rosemary Wong’s invaluable book, The First Days of School. But you may be less familiar with their eight-year series of advice columns, many of which are also aimed at the needs of novice teachers. Check them out!

What I'm about to post isn't exactly new on my part; however, as I gear up for my first days of school in a new school, I want to revisit and expand on my feelings about Harry Wong. Because I vividly remember my first day of teaching. I stood in front of about 15-20 English 9 workshop students in a room that had a broken air conditioner, and with sweat pooling in my armpits, began that prepared speech we're all supposed to put together for the first day.

I stumbled through it and when I was done, I looked at the clock and saw that it had only taken three minutes, so that meant there were 87 minutes of time for me to fill. My students sat and stared, slackjawed. I began babbling about what I like to read and then asked them what they might like to read. Nothing, it turned out.

By the time the bell finally rang, none of them had spoken much and I had violated what seemed like every rule in the book. I’d distributed textbooks, given a short writing assignment, and even assigned homework. It was my first day as a teacher and I had already lost them. All of them.

And That’s what I get for listening to Harry Wong.

When I was in the midst of becoming a teacher four years ago, slugging it out in Friday-night career switcher classes taught by administrators and principals, I was given a copy of The First Days of School. It was, they told me, one of the most important books on teaching that I would ever read because apparently Wong had a very revolutionary idea—teachers should treat the first day of school as the most important because you never get another chance to make a first impression. I guess it was revolutionary in a way because from what I recall of my experience as a student, the first day was always a wash because of assemblies and extended homerooms and all you learned was where your classes were and that your locker combination didn’t work.

As had been drilled into my head at that point, however, most of the methods used to teach me 15-20 years ago were wrong. So the traditional blowing off of day one was a cardinal sin. Then again, I’m sure the people telling me this hadn’t met my ninth grade English students; if they had, they skipped that truth so I wouldn’t be running for the hills before I even started. But they and Mr. Wong were the experts and everyone around me seemed to be psyched up for a great opening, especially after we all attended a district-wide pep rally. So I went the “Wong” way and bombed spectacularly.

I spent the better part of a week beating myself up for my disastrous first day of teaching, and only got over it when I got so mired in paperwork, grading, and planning that I didn’t have time to think about it. Eventually, I stopped sweating—the air conditioner in my room was fixed—and managed to get through most of the year without tripping over myself. So when I went back to plan my first day the following year, I took a hard look at The First Days of School, especially Wong’s blow-by-blow account of what to do. I agreed with his notion that your reputation as a teacher can precede you, but I more or less questioned everything else.

Is there value in contacting anyone before the first day? Sure, some students may take that as an invite for your class as a “safe haven” from the scary world of school, but many teachers don’t even get rolls until a few days before school starts and even if they did, 100-150 phone calls can be tiring and letters home often get lost in the morass of other school-related mailings parents receive (especially if the student is new to the school). Do I need to shake everyone’s hand when he or she enters and insist on sending him or her back outside if the greeting is not conducted to my satisfaction? I know that makes for good drama in a teacher movie, but being very forward—especially to high schoolers—can backfire very quickly and create unnecessary first day conflict. And as for Wong’s idea of a rehearsed speech all about you and your class? Well, I know all too well what a disaster that can be.

Wong seems focused on both minutiae and the hard sell, and while there is a significant amount of “selling” that goes on in a classroom on a day to day basis, the first day of school is not a meeting with a prospective client. You won’t lose the sale in the first five minutes if you do something gauche--you are with the same group of students for 180 days. Sure, some may not show up all the time and others may drop the class altogether, but nobody ever said that a 100% success rate was a requirement.

The second, third, fourth, and fifty-fifth impressions are just as, if not more important than the first. I have had students who are nightmares in September but are dreams by May, and vice versa. I can’t think of any long-term project I’ve been involved in where so much energy and emphasis was put into the beginning, especially when it’s clear that it’s the middle that’s the most crucial. Act II is always the most interesting act of a play, and mid-season always proves crucial to sports teams because that’s when you build the drama, learn from your mistakes, and fight to a satisfying conclusion.

The first day of school does not need to be focused and forced. It should be comfortable and at a pace that sets a tone you can work with. Instead of insisting on handshakes and presenting my biography, I don’t even introduce myself until after an icebreaker—I love trivia games, so that’s what we usually do—I figure that if I drone on about who I am and what we’ll do, by the time I want to get to know them they’ll be slackjawed, drooling, and comatose. In fact, in one of my classes last year, we had so much fun with getting to know you games and trivia that I didn’t get to the class rules, objectives, and syllabus until the last 10 or 15 minutes. It saved my sanity, to be honest, and while the 179 days that followed were by no means a cakewalk, I think that I would have had some of the problems I had with some of the same students if I’d followed all of Wong’s advice to the letter.

New teachers already have enough pressure on the first day of school; they do not need more. The veterans I taught with—who were supposedly doing everything “wrong” on day one—were right when they said that making it out alive is most important. There will be time to build a reputation, tackle the issue of respect, and meet all of the necessary objectives to become a successful and effective teacher. How you introduce yourself on the first day of school will not determine how much respect and success you will have for the rest of the school year, and when the first day of school begins this year, I will find myself in a new school, a new teacher with no prior reputation among my students. My copy of The First Days of School is stored safely on a bookshelf—in my old classroom, 75 miles away. I have no problem with it staying there.