Impressions: "First Day of School"

Okay, as I was saying, I kept notes initially in lieu of this blog--notes of all the different impressions and experiences I thought worthy of sharing--things I wanted to remember and tell you the moment I acquired the means to do so.  Well, those notes--those impressions are now nearly two months old and they all seem strange to me anymore--a bit faulty or misleading.  Ha, to be impressionable does not only mean one takes what comes; it also means--actually, it means more that one does not really understand what comes, and, consequently, one's initial impressions are at least as much self-manufactured as received.  I just finished reading "Flowers for Algernon" with my eighth grade class and it brought this point home to me.  Unable to register much of anything, like Charly, we are forced to fabricate essential aspects of our experiences in order to make sense of them--and we fabricate, not infrequently, the very reasons they are noteworthy.  Experiences are created, impressions, cultivated--character, the name we give to some tendency of response.  This is hardly a new or original insight, but my endeavor here, recording my first impressions so long after they were formed, makes it more observable.  Indeed, the hand that scribbled these notes on paper now seems to me to have trembled doing so, and it scarcely resembles either of the hands presently poised over this keyboard--and that, in only two months...

Take, for instance, our first day of school.  Sleep was rough the night before.  I had been bitten by mosquitoes (and who knows by what else) during our weekend jaunt to Arenal, and the bites, unnoticed initially, were itching terribly; but that wasn't the reason I couldn't sleep.  The real reason was because I did not associate the bites with the itching mounds they left all over my legs and arms and hands--I imagined a more immediate menace--in other words, I feared bedbugs.  Evidence to the contrary meant little as all the hairs on my body (and there are a lot of those, as you know) each seemed to announce a new bedfellow with my every twist and turn in the night.

Scabby and scratching, and sleepless, I went to school and presented myself to my infamous seventh grade Homeroom class, and they lived up in every way to their billing: full of energy, and marking their territory.  I will speak more of them in time to come, but suffice it to say I left school that day thinking only this: I was getting paid back for how terrible I was when I was in seventh grade.  Yes, my Costa Rican Septimo homeroom is like a whole class full of karma atonement.  Yikes!  I am sorry Mrs. Filmore, Mr. Suckle, Mrs. Howe...truly sorry...

As for Suzy, I was too self-absorbed to know much about her first day, but I know that before it  was over she somehow lost one of her six students--that's right, only six students, and yet, apparently, one more than is reasonable to expect anyone to keep track of...

And then there were our own children, who were all but set to win the most flexible and easygoing award, until the consequence of choosing not to eat their unfamiliar lunch reared its ugly head.  Ohhhh, it was endless, inconsolable tears--and that for our most easygoing one, Kiefer.  Not even Grandma was permitted to comfort him.

Now, Katy and Martha, already well-established as our saving graces, were planning, yet again, to ease our way: they had shopped and were preparing to make dinner.  But a storm had rolled in, and, apart from revealing to us a number of leaks in our roof and ceiling, it knocked out the power and delayed dinner until Katy was literally serving it up in the dark.  We ate by candlelight on the porch, poor Kiefer basically a puddle of pathos, and the rest of us not far behind.

Bedtime and cleaning up, and then I used Suzy's headlamp to plan my lessons--a first for me, but not especailly amusing at the time: the prospect of four different preps with middle schoolers for an entire year loomed large--four preps, not one of which I had ever taught before...

But the second day went more smoothly for me--for Suzy too, even though she woke up at 2:45 in the morning to take her mom and sister to meet the taxi that drove them to the airport.  Kiefer ate, and so did the other two.  The third and fourth days, and the fifth, all went their way, another week, and another still, a month, and so on until this very moment, when in all honesty, were it not for these notes, I would have trouble believing the day even happened, or, more to the point, that it could have happened, so different is my perspective now.  Of all the pieces that come together to form an impression, fear is at the same time the most natural and misleading.  So my students are learning as well as I.