Tomorrow is the first day of school. 

Twenty-four hours from the time I’m writing this, I’ll be with my new students, sharing stories of summer, working out classroom expectations, and starting to form the bonds that will make us – for nine or so months anyway – a sort of family.

Unfortunately, I’m not ready. 

I have a to-do list the length of a Walgreen’s receipt of various things I want to have done so my classroom is well and truly ready for the kiddos. Don’t get me wrong. If I got a call from my school, saying that I had to go in today and teach, I could. My classroom is far from being in shambles, but it’s not where I want it to be.

The best example of this is my book bin labels. I didn’t do a great job with my classroom library last year. It was well-organized (I live for organizing books), but as far as labeling by genre and/or author, it never got much further than “fiction” and “nonfiction.” I did put a lot of thought into what I wanted to do when I had the time, and I was psyched to turn my attention to that work this summer.

And at this moment, 80-ish percent of my book bins and shelves and labeled with fun cards I made. However, as I applied the labels yesterday, I discovered that when I made my list of genres and authors to make labels for, I managed to skip a whole shelf of bins. I brought home my laminator and clear matte spray so I can get them done today, but I’m not sure that I’ll bother.

Why?

Because I really need to learn to be comfortable with things not working out exactly the way I wanted. One of the ideas we visited and revisited last year in the Teacher Intern Program I participated in is being comfortable with a lack of closure. From my perspective as a fledgling educator, I couldn’t really nail down why that was so important. I mean, yeah, not everything gets tied up with a pretty bow in education, but still … it can’t be that bad, right?

Sorry, Mr. Ethan. It can be that bad.

Looking back at my first year teaching and at what I’ve experienced so far this year with setting up my classroom and going through inservice, I can see now that if the education field came with closure, it wouldn’t be the education field. 

 For example …

Every single student in my first class is a student I wish I’d had more time with to work on certain skills. Every. Single. One.

There were issues I worked on all last year to support certain students, and by the last day of school, I felt like I’d barely scratched the surface. Now it’s on to their new teachers to chip away at those same things.

I just plain didn’t get the chance to say goodbye to departing staff the way I wanted to.

At inservice, we rolled out a multi-day PBIS (Positive Behavioral Interventions & Supports) training to refresh veteran staff and prime new staff. There are about a million pieces to PBIS that I wanted to have in place beforehand, but we only got so far because there’s only so much time. I had to get comfortable with the idea that, if nothing else, we were training staff and giving folks a place to go with questions as we continue to develop materials. 

And then there’s my classroom …

Book bin labels. My hallway bulletin board. Number Corner. A 3 Before Me poster. Setting up my Kid Sasquatch chalkboard. And the list goes on and on. 

A colleague said to me yesterday, “The kids don’t know what you haven’t done. You’ll get it done, it’ll be new to them, and they’ll appreciate it.” I really needed to hear that. 

Not everything is ready when we want it to be. Sometimes things we want to be done never get done at all. Get comfortable with lack of closure. Not everything ends the way we wa