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Teachers feel nerves on first day too
Bruce Matlock photo
Teacher Patricia Mejia (left) and assistant Rosa Vargas go over paperwork.
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Published: August 25, 2009
While the first day of school is always an adjustment time for the students, teachers have butterflies in their stomachs as well.
When the school bell rings this morning to start classes at East Elementary School, Patricia Mejia will start a new chapter in her teaching career.
Interestingly, it will be a reverse mirror image of the first one.
Mejia is from a small coastal town in Colombia in South America, where she was a teacher for eight years. She has been in the United States just three weeks.
And, yet, when she begins her lessons today, she will be teaching in her native Spanish for the first time in her career.
"I taught all the subjects in English there," she said. "So I am nervous about teaching in Spanish."
Mejia and fellow teacher Zaidy Costa — who is also from Colombia — will teach kindergarten in East's new immersion program.
"We don't expect them to know any Spanish at all when they start," said Costa, who taught in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School System for three years. "But all the lessons will be in Spanish. We'll teach everything the regular North Carolina curriculum requires, except it will all be in Spanish."
Mejia and Costa are two of Iredell-Statesville Schools' 54 new teacher hires who start work today.
Along with teaching in her native tongue for the first time, Mejia said she is also a little jittery about some other things, like dealing with the nervous emotions of her young charges, who are brand new to the classroom.
"This is kindergarten," Mejia said. "And there is always crying. And sometimes the parents come in and then they start crying."
But Mejia said she'll learn the ropes fast enough.
"We've been working very hard," she said.
En Espanol.
She translated,"Hemos trabajado muy duro."
Hard work also preceded Carabet Sisk's journey to the front of the classroom. But the road was pretty much mapped out from a young age.
"I was never going to do anything else," Sisk said while leaning against a desk in her science classroom at Statesville High School, the school from which she graduated four years ago. She picked up her teaching degree from Appalachian State University in May.
"This is it," she said. "And I've been training for it a long time."
Sisk joins a teachers roster at Statesville High that already includes her mother and step-father, Suzanna and Mike Francisco.
"I've always been part of Statesville (High) and always been involved with the school," she said. "I've just become a different part of the family. I was a student and now I'm a teacher."
Sisk recalls when she was a child and would imitate her mother's classroom technique.
"Instead of playing house, I would take my mom's planning books and play school," Sisk said. "I would assign projects to my imaginary friends."
Sisk said she is ready but admits to being nervous.
"It's a good nervous though," she said Monday. "I don't think it would be normal if I wasn't nervous at all. I just hope I can go to sleep."
New South Iredell High School science teacher Cassie Papaj has the same hope.
"Don't let this calm appearance fool you. I'm definitely nervous," said Papaj (pronounced POP-eye). "I'm just trying not to let that be my overpowering emotion."
Papaj graduated from Western Iredell High School in 2004 and from the University of North Carolina Asheville last December.
She said she has prepared for today since the day she was hired about a month ago.
The first lesson in her earth sciences classes will deal with weather, she said, because it is hurricane season and the topic is a hot one.
She said she is also prepared for the future classes but adds, "The planning has made me a little nervous because you never know when you've done enough."
New teachers are fond of the term "classroom management" to describe the confluence of information dissemination and basic rules.
"For me, that means getting the students to do what you want them to do, when you want them to do it," Papaj said.
"But," she added, "I'm anxious — yes anxious is the word — I'm anxious to get started."
And for those butterflies to fly away.
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