I used to approach Labor Day with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. The holiday always marked the end of summer and the beginning of a new school year. I can still remember those back-to-school feelings, a mixture of near panic interlaced with excitement and hope. You felt like smiling and throwing up at the same time. The smell of a fresh notebook still makes me swoon.

            Those feelings, imprinted on my young brain, never really disappeared so even when the school year began earlier for my children, come Labor Day I’d still have a vague feeling of apprehension and anticipation in the pit of my stomach.

            But this year I didn’t get all nostalgic and fuzzy about Labor Day.  All those great feelings about school and new beginnings, well, I’m not sure if I’m just experiencing a temporary inability to access them or I’ve been so traumatized those memories have been obliterated.

            For the past nine weeks I’ve been teaching at a high school. It’s a year-round school, consisting of nine week terms and three week breaks. Labor Day marked the end of my first nine weeks as a teacher.

            I know that some people realize their calling as a teacher at a young age and have long, exemplary careers.  Some come to teaching late, possibly as a second career, and find that they, too, are fulfilled in that role.

            I’ve never wanted to be a teacher. If I have learned anything from my recent experience it has confirmed my original feelings about the profession. I have a lot of respect for teachers. My husband has been a college professor for 25 years. I, however, don’t belong in a classroom. My gut was right.

            I teach at a public charter school in a small town in rural Georgia. It’s located in an old farming supply store that’s been retrofitted, on a very tight budget, to serve about 140 middle and high school students. Classrooms are more like open corrals. There’s no cafeteria. The kids eat lunch in the multipurpose/assembly room. Weightlifting, yoga, and billiards – what passes as physical education --  are taught in what used to be the loading dock. The computers are old, the electrical system suspect. The local school board rejected the original application for the charter school so the school’s governing board, made up of teachers and parents, was forced to seek state approval. Local funding was denied.

            It’s hard to describe the school. To say that it runs on a shoestring, admittedly an overused cliché, doesn’t come close to the reality of how little the school has. Maybe I could say it runs on a thread-bare shoestring, a shoestring so stretched and strained its been knotted and re-knotted so many times it no longer resembles a shoestring.

            Despite this, it has one of the highest graduation rates in the state and most of its graduates go to colleges, even prestigious private colleges.

            Quirky. Unconventional. It’s not for every student, but its constructivist, multiliteracy approach to learning works for both high achievers and those rejected by every other system in the county.

            And they needed a teacher. I needed a job. Before I go on, I need to admit three things: first, my daughter graduated from the school three years ago. I am neither a stranger to the school nor to its operation. She loved it. She thrived.

            My students didn’t know about my previous affiliation with the school, but they did know I was an inexperienced teacher. They could smell it. They saw the panic in my eyes, the little beads of sweat at my temples. I was too upbeat.

            I had been warned about the new teacher syndrome. I knew not to make the mistake of being too friendly. Some colleagues said I needed to scare them first, show them I’m human later. Others suggested the ‘school’s fun, learning’s fun’ approach.

            I’m easy going. I’m nice. I’m a mother. I want to help. I’ve spent decades volunteering at different organizations, including this one. I decided on the learning is fun approach. I wasn’t too friendly, but I wasn’t an ogre, either. I laid out what we were going to cover, how I was going to grade, and that we would all be learning together.

            I was pretty sure I had made a mistake after the first day of class, not just in my approach to teaching, but in teaching.

            I didn’t belong.

            It was clear that they had no interest in the class, in me, in school, in anything. In other words, they were typical high schoolers. They didn’t want to talk and their body language told me they thought they knew more than I ever would.

            The first week was pretty bad, but the second was worse. I found myself disliking certain students, losing my patience with others, and wondering what the heck others were even doing in the class. No one, it seemed, wanted to do anything related to the class, nothing related to learning. We all used computers to access articles for the class. We did in-class writing on computers. I found that without exception my students were experts at being able to toggle between internet sites when I wasn’t looking, and sometimes when I was. If this had been a class on internet shopping or celebrity news, we’d have gotten along famously.

            I cajoled. I begged. I threatened. By the fourth week, I yelled. The yelling part I didn’t like. I was being challenged by one student and I had to show him, and the rest of the class, that I was, indeed, the one in charge. It worked.

            By the fifth week, though, I was dreading going to work. We had created a routine that, technically, enabled learning to take place. We got along, for the most part. For the next four weeks we managed to write, and publish, a school newspaper. I was extremely proud of what we put out; most of them could have cared less.

            The second thing I need to admit is that I teach one class; the third is that I only have eight students.

            One class, eight students and I still can’t find the magic, for them or for me. We did what we were supposed to do but nobody, well, almost nobody, was happy. I wasn’t happy, that’s certain. Despite their accomplishment in publishing a pretty good newspaper, most of my students didn’t care and weren’t terribly enthused about continuing the project for the remainder of the semester – another nine weeks.

            Labor Day became my savior.

            I’m going to use the time to reflect on my teaching and to do some soul searching. My friends also suggest I work on an attitude adjustment.

            I know that the buck stops at my desk. I’m to blame for the success or failure of my class. But I’m also putting some responsibility on my students, some of whom are only in the class because they need another English credit to graduate and mine was the only one available. We came together by default.

            I’ll admit that before I walked into the classroom scenes from Stand and Deliver played in my head. I wanted to be the kind of teacher who inspired. But I quickly came to my senses. After the first couple of weeks I was disabused of any romantic notions that I’d see metaphorical fireworks as my reluctant students finally came to understand the value of good writing.

            So Labor Day is here and instead of feeling a nostalgic kind of longing for the excitement of a new school year, I’m walking around with a little extra bounce in my step. When I close my eyes I don’t picture a tidy classroom with new text books stacked on empty desks.  But neither do I see sullen teenage faces staring back at me, questioning why capitalization is important, why they should punctuate, why they should bother with complete thoughts when everything is written in twitter and text bites.

            Exaggeration? Possibly.

            But I am sure of one thing: I’m not teacher material.

            I’ve thrown my school clothes in a pile in the closet. My notebooks are tucked out of sight. As the early fall leaves begin their slow progression from green to yellow to red, my eight students are gently fading from my memory. I’m kissing the classroom blues goodbye.

            Ahh, Labor Day. How I love you.  

(Edward James Olmos as Jaime Escalante, the dedicated teacher in Stand and Deliver)