After a two-week break, it’s back to work this morning for teachers all over the country, including me.

For better or worse, I was not able to let go of thinking about the classroom while I was off. I spent much of my “vacation” doing planning activities, including doing careful lesson plans, diagramming a rearrangement of my classroom, reading books on teaching, upgrading filing and paper organization systems, and  making a stoplight out of construction paper (it’s to communicate noise level expectations in the classroom as they change from red: “silent — testing” to yellow “whispering only” to green: “normal voices and discussion.”)

Am I excited? Of course. And worried. The first year of teaching is a challenge, which, back in the summer, I was warned about by a lot of people.  I tend to assume that if one person tells you something, you can take it with a grain of salt, but if a dozen people give you the same caution, you probably need to listen carefully. It is hard to be a first year teacher, I will not deny that.

I now know a few things. I know that I love teaching. And that I can go to work without my household collapsing into itself. Those are good things. But there is always much more to learn. I have really only barely scratched the surface of what I want to learn about kids and teaching. The only way to find out the answers to many questions is to get out there are see. So this morning, I’ll go back to the school and start to discover more.