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35 Don’t let them see you vulnerable. Be firm. If you look weak, they will walk on you forever. Engage them. If you don’t engage them, they won’t care about learning, and you’ll lose their interest forever. Smile—it sets the tone for the rest of the semester. Don’t smile. Never smile. Don’t smile until Christmas. Get contact information from them. You need their contact information. They will give you the wrong contact information. It won’t matter whether you get contact information or not because you will have different students in your classes by the second week, thus forcing you to get all new contact information. Assign books. Don’t assign books. They will lose the books. Or you will have different students in your class by the next week, and your books will be assigned to kids who no longer show up. Have a system for everything. Give them name tags. Make seating charts. Don’t make seating charts. Instead, give them numbers when they walk into the door, which should match numbers that you assign to the desks, and as you do this, write each number down on a clipboard beside the corresponding student’s name, and the desk that corresponds to the number the student holds will be that student’s seat for the semester. This is how you make a “Classroom Designed for Success .” Also, make sure to tape the numbers to the desks—students will try to peel off the numbers. The voices from a summer of training comprised a schizophrenic chorus. I sat cross-legged on a new double mattress, which had just been delivered a few days earlier to a row house, which I’d just rented with three other women I’d just met, and I stared at a mess: dozens of handouts designed by other teachers; books from my former life as a literature student; scrap paper with my scribbles; an idle pen. The summer’s crash-course in teaching had paralyzed me. In the center of my new comforter I faced my first week of teaching and thought about how a “real” teacher would not plan her lessons from a crouched position on her first larger-than-twin-size bed. Just the other night, I’d gotten a new tip. “On my first day, I played that game,” a third-year TFAteacher had told a group of us at a bar. “You know, Chapter 3 First Day 36 Teaching in the Terrordome the game where you go down the line and ask each kid a question and they each get to ask you one question?” I nodded. I knew the game. It seemed like a good getting-to-know-you kind-of game. “I just sort of figured they’d ask me about my hobbies or something. But one kid goes, ‘Are you gay?’ And I just blew it. I froze. So another kid shouts, ‘He gay! Look at his tie, he gay,’ and that was it. I lost all credibility with that class.” The teacher took a gulp from his beer. This was the same guy who, during TFA presentations, had seemed so competent, so cool. Someone asked how he got his class back. “I didn’t. The first year was hell!” I vowed to steer clear of that game, and on my mattress I finally scrapped together a first-day lesson. A review of class rules. A jeopardy game testing students’ understanding of class rules. And from my stacks, I chose a book I’d loved so much that I’d stolen it from my high school in tenth grade: The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I flipped through the yellowed, musky pages, searching for the scene where, while in prison, Malcolm turns his whole life around. Word by word, he copies the entire dictionary, pulls himself from nearly illiterate dealer to historic intellectual. Aardvark begins his journey from everyday criminal to American revolutionary. Aardvark makes a man iconic. I decided to use the book despite the fact that I thought a white teacher who taught a class of mostly black kids about a black revolutionary seemed fairly condescending. But it was nearing evening, and I couldn’t afford to philosophize. And I loved that book. “Students will be able to read a passage of Malcolm X’s autobiography and identify the main idea and subordinate ideas.” This was one of my first written objectives. But my real objective wasn’t measurable...

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