Syllabus Week

I had friends in college that used to call the first day of classes “Syllabus Day.” The idea was that on the first day of school, professors wouldn’t do much more than hand out the syllabus and talk about the class in general terms. For the most part it was true and it also happened to be a convenient excuse to skip the first week of school. With this in mind, I approached my first week of classes with low expectations, simply hoping I would be able to introduce the class to my students and to talk about what I expected of them. And now after a full week of “school” I realize how naively high those expectations were.

I arrived at the school at 8am on Monday, exactly the time I was told to show up. Though there were a handful of students that were waiting, I was the first teacher to show up. The others wandered in around 8:30. I felt a little weird being the first teacher there on the first day of school, but I’ve had plenty of experience waiting at the school. On my first day of classes in July I was told to show up on Thursday at 7:00am. I did as I was told, but then had to wait an hour before anyone else arrived. They had failed to mention that since the hour had “sprung forward,” 7am actually meant 8am. When the other teachers arrived and told me why I had had to wait, I cursed every single one of them under my breadth. Then I made sure, in the future, to confirm all meetings with a discussion as to whether the person was talking hora vieja, hora solar, or hora normal.

So, the late arrival of the teachers didn’t surprise me much. What did surprise me was that by 9am we were all still sitting in the teachers’ lounge not doing anything. Meanwhile, most of the students had arrived and were hanging out, running around, fighting, dancing, and enjoying “syllabus day.” Again, the students’ behavior wasn’t much different than any other normal day of school, but it was a little more active considering it was the first day of school and that all of the students had been asked to arrive at 8am as opposed to only half of them. At 10am we had a 20 minute “assembly” where the principal and the government representative spoke to all students and staff. At 10:30 the students were dismissed for the day and asked to return on Tuesday at 8am.

Not very productive I thought, but I had seen the warning signs. The two weeks prior to the first day of class, the teachers and administration spent the days waiting for the parents to arrive at the school to sign up their sons and daughters. I thought it was a bit strange that no one seemed to be working on a class schedule or assigning students to the morning or afternoon shift. The Friday before the first day of class the teachers didn’t know what classes they’d be teaching, if they’d be teaching in the morning or afternoon, or what their class schedule would look like. Why did I think that the first day of school would be organized?

Tuesday was more of the same disorganization and chaos. On Monday afternoon, the administration had decided which students would have classes in the morning and which in the afternoon. How did they let the students know Tuesday morning? They tried to congregate all of the students (900 strong) in front of the school to read students’ names and what shift they were assigned to. Did it work? Hahaha…

After getting through no more than 30 names, it was too loud to hear the teacher. So, they decided to give a list of students to each teacher and then allowed the students to run around trying to find their name. I didn’t ask why they couldn’t just tape the lists to the front wall. In fact, after I saw a girl start to cry because she wasn’t in the section she wanted to be in, I left too annoyed to stay to see what would happen next.

By Wednesday morning my expectations were low. All I really wanted to know was who I would be working with and when my classes would be. It didn’t happen. They got pretty far creating, rearranging, and discussing the schedule they made on the chalk board, but it was completely erased at 11am. At that point, I told my principal that she could call me when they knew my schedule and I left.

Though the tentative schedule was finally agreed to on Friday, they all tell me it will change. As for the students, they got through the first week with a little more than an hour of class time. Which I suppose is a good thing considering that many of the students decided not to show up until Thursday. At the rural school where I teach, 28 of the 150 students showed up on the first day. Is this because the students know the teachers won’t be organized/prepared or are the teachers unorganized/unprepared because they know very few of the students show up? I’m not sure (though there’s no excuse for the teachers being as unprepared as they were), but “syllabus day” just turned into “syllabus week” and I haven’t even gotten to address my students yet. We should have been so lucky in college.