Big Sigh of Relief

Indeed, if you heard or felt a huge whoosh yesterday evening that would’ve been the result of the huge sigh I let out upon hearing from N that yesterday was awesome, the best first day of school ever. My body released about 10 tons of pressure stored up in every fiber of my being.

You see, school is not necessarily N’s thing. Every year we dread the first day of school because it will bring tons of unknowns with it – different teacher, different kids (well, not all different but they remix the class each year plus this is a pretty transient community with lots of comings and goings), different rules, different expectations. It’s just different, and different is something N approaches with much trepidation. Therefore, I can’t help but feel nervous about it myself. Of course I want things to go well for N. I want him to like school. I know he won’t like it as much as I did. After all, I lived for school. I loved school. I loved to learn. Very few feel about school the way I did. I know that. But I sure don’t want him to hate it and to dread it every single day, and there have been school years when that has been the case.

There were a few things that W and I did to try to make this year better than some others. Because W was a volunteer at school last year he had the chance to interact with both of the fifth grade teachers and to observe how they interacted with and taught their students. It was his opinion that for a few reasons one was significantly better suited to be N’s teacher than the other. I agreed with his reasoning and together we submitted a letter to the principal requesting that N be assigned to Mr. T5’s (stands for Teacher 5th Grade) class stating our reasons for it. We knew that school policy is not to guarantee placement in accordance with parental requests, but we also knew that at least one reason for that is that if a preponderance of parents request one teacher they can’t very well load up 80% of the class on one teacher and 20% on the other. We hoped that not every parent was requesting Mr. T5 for their child.

Room assignments were posted late last week, and N was among the first to go check them out on the front door of the school. He was ecstatic that he got Mr. T5 as a teacher so that was our first hurdle down. From then on N was actually looking forward to school starting yesterday. He double checked his backpack repeatedly to make sure all his supplies were ready to go. He plotted his opening day outfit (something he has never cared about at all before), and insisted on getting a haircut before school started even though it meant having someone new do it because C wasn’t available to do it until after school started. I hoped against hope that he wasn’t building himself up with expectations too high to be met.

And yesterday? Well, yesterday went just about as perfectly as anyone could hope. N loves Mr. T5 (in spite of him being an Ohio St. fan) which is awesome because N can use some good male role models in his life. N loves being one of the “big kids” at school and the fact that he can sign up to participate on the safety patrol. N loved that the only homework Mr. T5 sent home last night was homework for the parents (a page of questions about contact information and anything he might need to know about the student).

So yeah. That big rush of air last night? No call for alarm. That was just one huge sigh of relief from me.