Co-reported by Fatima Ali.
It’s 6 a.m. on the first day of school and MVHS students are nervously rushing to get ready, anxiously awaiting their schedule, double checking their outfits and mentally preparing themselves for the day, hoping to make the best first impression possible. But they aren’t the only ones — in the meantime, teachers are nervously looking over their lesson plans for the first day of class, hoping that the first day teaching a new class will run smoothly.Going back to school might be scary and stressful for students, but this can be the case for teachers as well. Math teacher Joe Kim, English teacher Jireh Tanabe and Math and Science teacher Sushma Bana are teaching new classes this year, and their summers can be just as busy as those of students who load up their vacation months with volunteer work, internships and supplementary classes.
Math teacher Joe Kim is teaching JAVA for the first time this year, and although he took multiple computer science classes in both high school and college, he has spent a lot of time preparing to teach this class.
Kim came to school nine times over the summer to meet with other JAVA teachers — around 36 hours total.
“[It] really helped because those guys are very knowledgeable and they gave me a lot of resources, and I was able to use all that stuff to help me transition,” Kim said. “I had to do more thinking and understanding, rather than trying to create something new.”
English teacher Jireh Tanabe had a similar experience; she had previously read some books from the Mythology curriculum in her free time but she still spent longer than she anticipated reading new books, re-reading old ones and preparing to teach Mythology for the first time. She’s kept her energy up through it all though since the class curriculum differs from those of the other English classes she’s taught before.
“It’s looking at it through stories that were once oral and now have been written down for us and looking from a different vantage point,” Tanabe said. “That’s different and that’s exciting because I love stories and I love storytelling.”
Other teachers, like Science and math teacher Sushma Bana, are teaching classes that involve subjects they already had experience with before.
Bana, who is teaching AP Physics 1 for the first time this year, also taught regular Physics for the first time the previous year. She was notified that the position was open right before the school year started and despite having no advance notice, she decided to take the opportunity since she had always wanted to teach physics.
“My schedule was crazy,” Bana said. “But I think it’s one of those things where if you have an opportunity, [you] take it or leave it, and then if you say, ‘okay, I’m going to take it,’ then you don’t think about what it takes, you just say ‘I need to get this job done.’”
For Bana, teaching the class itself is a learning curve that parallels her students. And she feels that because she is honest about how she’s still learning as she goes motivates her students, sending them the message that they don’t always need to be perfect.
“When I [studied] physics, that was 25 years ago in India and some of the instruments that we use in class now, you know the lab stuff, I’ve never really worked with them,” Bana said. “So for me, I just feel like a student, learning how to use labquest, learning how to use all these sensors and probes and whatnot.”
But teaching a lab class like Physics that required certain lab equipment meant another, more unexpected cause of stress — switching classrooms.
“I was in two buildings — D and E and I had to switch classes every single period, so I’d go second period in E, 3rd period in D…” Bana said. “I was just like the kids, running around.”
Bana, however isn’t alone in having to run around from each class to the next. Kim also switches rooms on a daily basis and he finds it more inconvenient.
“Being in one room, you can relax you can chill out — let the people go and then everything’s there and you can organize it but now you [have] to move different rooms so you gotta carry things more,” Kim said. “Like today, I forgot my roster in the other room, so now I’m like ‘ahh’. You’re going to have to find a way to get around that.”
Aside from continually transferring rooms, Kim said he enjoyed the class and it has run smoother than expected. Despite switching classrooms or stressing about learning new curriculum, teachers like Tanabe know they have one thing that they’ll always be familiar with — the students.
“Students, I’m always comfortable with because kids are awesome — especially here at MVHS,” Tanabe said.
And as students flood into their new classes, nervous about whether they’d made the right class choice, teachers teaching new subjects with their minds crammed with the new curriculum hope they can live up to their students’ expectations.
