Today is my 28th first day of school as a public education employee. 

No, let’s make that 29 . . . 

My first job was as a part-time Spanish teacher at a school on a block schedule. I taught Spanish I during the first two blocks of the day, but in the afternoon I subbed for other teachers. I had graduated from the University of Alabama in December with a Bachelor of Science in Education and a double major in English and Spanish. Finding any kind of job in education in the middle of the school year was quite a task, so I was fortunate to be hired anywhere.

I was a 21-year-old new teacher, having just turned 21 that October during my student teaching. I was as green as a gourd, and I did not wear jeans for most of my first years. 

Dress the part, we were told. Be professional. 

Reflect on your teaching. Always try to find a way to be better tomorrow than you were today.

So let’s reflect:

I stayed busy during that spring semester of my first official job in education, for teachers often seem to find things to do during the second half of the year. Teachers had doctors’ appointments and field trips and mental health days, although we didn’t call them that in 1998. But everyone knew who needed a break, and if you wanted to come in and work in the morning, then I could take care of your classes in the afternoon while you went shopping, fishing, or had an affair.

One of the teachers was involved in some sort of extracurricular marital activity, so the story goes. I subbed for him a lot, and by the end of the semester his wife was filing for divorce. It was all the talk, but subbing for his classes helped pad my $400 a month check.

I wasn’t making the big bucks.

But I was getting experience that is hard to come by any other way.

I learned why the classes on the opposite side of my classroom’s retractable wall were a chaotic mess, why it almost always sounded like a zoo in there, why the students, on some days, would cram papers and notes and pencils and anything else they could find beneath the crack of that wall and send them to the other side (my room). 

When I subbed for that teacher, she had only left me with vague plans and not even the time her third block class was supposed to go to lunch. She might as well have written, “Forget teaching. Just keep them alive.”

I learned what it was like to sub for a special education teacher and help her multi-need students with a variety of classwork. 

I learned what it was to supervise 80 students in a P.E. class. I was glad to have two other teachers, who were also assigned to the class, but it still felt like being in a war zone compared to a traditional classroom environment.

I learned what it was to go full days in a job where you never know what to expect, for sometimes I would be contacted in the morning to see if I could work for someone during the afternoon. 

Most days, that’s exactly what I did.

It was almost like student teaching, round two, except messier.

It was much more like the way real life works. 

For someone who has ended up working the past seventeen years in educational administration, it was the best training possible. I saw all the problems that come from mismanaged classrooms. I saw the personal struggles from most teachers in the building, for it was likely that I worked for them at some point. I heard the desperation in their voices, or in the requests from the administrators or secretaries, when they asked me if I could work that afternoon.

They were in a tight spot, and they needed some help.

But the best part of that semester: I saw the great variety of students that make up a school. From their dreary-eyed stares in the early morning over conjugating the verb “ir,” to their excitement over rectangle pizza and fresh cinnamon rolls for lunch, to their plans for the afternoons and evenings, whether work or athletics or time with friends, I learned that the heartbeat of the school resides in its students.

They are and will always be the reason I do what I do. It is my past students’ faces I’ve seen in these early morning hours before this 29th first day of school, when I couldn’t sleep for anticipation over the prospects of another year.

And people ask me when I’m going to retire. Soon and very soon, I say. When other doors open. I know there are things I have left to do in this life that aren’t in the field of education.

Just know that these years have flown. I remember those first few months as a part-time teacher just like they happened yesterday.

I remember the meeting with the district payroll clerk who assured me that my time there would be counted for full-time service credit, and for 25 years, eight additional months showed on my yearly report.

Something magical must happen when you hit 25 years, for an audit of my record was performed, and five months of service credit were removed.

What used to be 25 years and eight months turned into 25 years and three months.

I read the TRS handbook, and part-time work is to count for part-time service credit.

I didn’t contest it. It would most likely go nowhere.

But if the TRS only knew what those first months meant to me and my now decades-long career in education, they might reconsider.

I’d at least hope that they might reflect.