Teachers' opening salvo sets tone for students

Few topics create more angst for teachers than the First Day Lesson.

If you have educators in your life, you know they’ve been thinking about how to start the coming school year since flipping the calendar to August, if not before.

The teaching profession, for the most part, endorses the philosophy that well begun is well done, that whatever happens on the first day sets the stage for every moment of the rest of the year. So that first lesson has to be sharp like cheddar. Or an obsidian knife. Don’t just break the ice in class, slice through it.

One of the most common icebreakers is the Candy Trick, where the teacher stands at the door with a bag of sweets (shades of the witch in “Hansel and Gretel”) and tells students to take as many pieces as they’d like. Only later do students discover they must share one fact about themselves for each piece.

A variation is the Toilet-Paper Trick, where the teacher substitutes a roll of (unused) teepee for the candy and has students roll off as many squares as they want. Then they have to write something about themselves on each square.

Teachers either love to share their first-day lessons or guard them like Gollum, stroking their origami notecards or glitter-covered snowflakes and crooning, “My precious! My precious!”

The sharers post everywhere, all over Facebook and social media, during staff meetings and to complete strangers in office-supply stores. They are proud of their intricate charts to ensure that every student will speak to every other student on the first day, or that each kid will contribute a block to a quilt on the wall.

I’m not immune to shenanigans on the first day, but not terribly original either. For the last few years, I’ve relied on the Notecard Trick, giving one to each student and having them answer some moderately gonzo questions about themselves − least favorite food, a color they’ve always wanted to dye their hair, a song they never want to hear again, etc. The only thing they can’t put on the card is their name.

Then I collect the cards, shuffle, and hand them back out. Students must find the owner of the card I give them, have a conversation and introduce that person to the rest of the class.

One thing teachers, myself included, often don’t consider is how First Day Lessons affect introverts. Sure, outgoing kids will love to rattle off 47 fun facts about themselves on 47 sheets of toilet paper or introduce a fellow student who hates linguine, but what about those who find such classroom antics painful? Or who have been subjected to them multiple times on the same day?

Edutopia, a website from the George Lucas Educational Foundation, offers different questions for teachers to ask at the start of the year. 

They are: 

1. What helps you feel welcomed?
2. How do you like to be greeted?
3. What strengths do you bring to the classroom? The school?
4. What do you like most about school so far? What could change?

These are a great foundation, either in addition to a rousing game of Two Truths and a Lie or in place of it. They give students lots of room to navigate, so what teachers learn might be more significant than the last show they binge-watched on Netflix.

A final point about first-day activities − or first days in general − is that it’s OK if they don’t go perfectly for teachers or students. Trying to make them flawless is part of why everybody is so jittery in August.

Most school years have 180 days. While the first is important, so are the other 179. One thing all teachers can model is a willingness to admit that yesterday didn’t go so well, but they’re back at it today, learning from what went right and what went wrong, even if the latter happened on the over-hyped first day.

That’s not always something that fits on a square of toilet paper, even if you write really really small.