It's that time of year again.

Tomorrow is the first day of school up here in Ontario, at least for most school boards. (The fact that September started on a Tuesday made for some problems from the perspective of fitting enough school days into the calendar to satisfy the law, so a few school boards started before Labour Day. This is rare around here.)

I'll tell you a secret: you know that feeling you have the night before every first day of school of your life, when you're pretty sure you won't sleep and you're worried about your teacher being mean and you dream of finding yourself in the cafeteria with no clothes on and everyone laughing at you? Yeah, teachers have that too. On the night when I could most use a good night's sleep, I never, ever get one. And the reason is the same: we all know that what happens on the first day of school is going to set the tone for the rest of the school year. Teachers have the added guilt of knowing that if it all goes wrong, the blame will be mostly theirs. That's not exactly a soporific thought.

So, what to do to ensure that the first day is productive and sets the right tone? First, think about what the kids will be telling their parents when they get home from school on the first day. The first question is going to be, "Do you like your teacher?"

Not, "What did you learn?" That's the second question. The first is about relationship. It's about knowing your teacher wants you there and sees you as a valuable part of the class. It's about community, and it's about that adult who is going to shape that kid's life for the next ten months. And it's about how the other kids interact with that adult - because most kids won't have more than a few interactions with the teacher themselves, personally, so they're watching what the teacher does with everyone else for clues.

The key to the first day is to begin to establish that relationship. So, how do you want things to be in your classroom for the rest of this school year? Do you want to be the kind of teacher who doesn't smile until November? Do you want the kids to know that if they set one toe out of line, they'll be on the carpet in the principal's office? If so, come in yelling. But be prepared: once you start, it's really, really hard to stop.

I have a few catch-phrases for the tone I try to set. The first is "warm strict." The second is "community of learners." A new one, added this year, is, "Failure is not an option." Let me explain.

There are rules in my classroom. They relate to respect, responsibility, and safety. They're designed to make the classroom a good learning environment for everyone in it. One of the first things we're going to do on the first day of school is get the kids to generate the list of rules based on those three words. Usually, the kids will come up with a whole list of don'ts. Under respect, they'll put, "Don't interrupt the teacher" or "don't speak out of turn" or "don't tear up the library books." Under responsibility, they'll suggest not leaving your homework at home and not losing your pencil. I give the kids half a dozen sticky notes each (seriously, I don't know how anyone ran a classroom before sticky notes) and ask them to write down two things for each of the three words. then we stick them up on chart paper. The next step is to pare them down, because you've now got forty-odd sticky notes under each category. So you pick one of the ones that says "Don't interrupt the teacher" and one that says "raise your hand to speak" and ask, "What do you think of these two suggestions?" Someone will hopefully tell you that they mean the same thing, so you discuss which one is better to put on the wall. You write it on a different piece of chart paper, because the first one still has forty-odd sticky notes in each category.

If you're really adventurous, you can divide the class into groups and give each of the groups the job of coming up with the three or four rules in each category that seem to come up the most often. If your students haven't often done that kind of group work, you may want to leave it for another time when you can teach the rules of group work first. My kids are well-versed in it so I will probably do it this way.

Once you've got your three or four rules under each key word, you've begun to establish relationships. But there are always a few kids who want to test the rules right away. They need boundaries and they need to test if you're going to maintain those boundaries, so they start talking out. How you handle this on the first day is every bit as important as setting the rules to begin with.

If you send the student to the office or yell at her, you give up your power and your relationship with that student. That kid is going to make your life hell for the next ten months because that kid will believe you don't like her, have never liked her, and will never like her. She's not going to do a single thing you ask without putting up a fight. And twenty-odd other kids are watching you mess it up with her and thinking, "If she talks like that to that student, how is she going to talk to me when I mess up?"

If you do nothing, you're sending the message that the rules are negotiable. That student is never going to do anything the first time you ask, because they've learned they don't have to. They can waste time indefinitely just by asking for explanations or creating minor disruptions that eventually, you have to deal with. (This, by the way, is my biggest pitfall. I hate following through on the little stuff, and it invariably becomes big stuff when I don't. New Year's Resolution: follow through on the small stuff.)

So the only course of action is to call them on the behaviour without ruining the relationship. Using a teacher look is a bad idea for this one, because, while it might work, it's not obvious enough to the other kids; they may just think the misbehaving kid decided to stop on her own. So a quiet word - "We just discussed how we don't behave like that. Please stop." is your first course of action. When it escalates - which may not happen on the first day but is inevitable at some point - you respond, "I already asked you to stop. Can you go to [designated place] for a few minutes and re-read the rules until I get there?" Your conversation about which rule was broken and what you expect can and should happen out of earshot of the other kids; but the fact that it is happening should be obvious.

You decide how to handle it at that point. I suggest recess detentions followed by a phone call home if there's a third and fourth infraction on the same day; the office is for the fifth infraction, and the principal should be there to support you in meting out discipline rather than meting it out herself.

The second question that kids will be asked when they get home is, "What did you learn?" That's a bit stickier, because the first day is generally so much about setting up for learning that it often isn't about learning anything new. I have a slew of diagnostic tests to run on my kids in the next two weeks, and the first one will indeed start tomorrow. But I can choose a diagnostic that will teach them something and give them a few concrete facts to give their parents. I give a simple multiple-intelligences quiz that asks, how many ways are you smart? By the end of it, they've figured out their two or three main forms of intelligence, which they can go home and tell their parents, and I have a crucial piece of information on each of my kids.

Another new thing I'm introducing this year is the Recess Box. It's a tote box that lives in a corner of my room that has a collection of simple games, games that can mostly be played in the fifteen minutes of an indoor recess. I have Mancala made up on cardstock and using bread tags in place of counters or stones; several Yahtzee kits, with a score card I made up myself, some scrap paper, and five dice; a couple of decks of cards; and a few store-bought games like Scrabble, Connect Four, and checkers. We're going to spend some time on Tuesday exploring the recess box, playing the games, and developing the rules for using them and putting them away properly afterward.

I'll probably start their reading notebooks tomorrow as well, including the reading logs in the back of them so I can figure out which kids didn't pick up a single book all summer and which ones had to be chased out of the library at closing time, and which fell somewhere in between. Wednesday I'll introduce math journals - duotangs with graph paper and lined paper in them, in which to do any math work that is to be marked - and begin either the DRA testing for reading or the OWA for writing. (Probably the DRA; it takes more time because there's an individual component, but they're a lot more familiar with it and it won't stress them out to do it the first week.) I will start French, because I don't want it to seem like an afterthought and because it's another great way to build community.

With any luck, being "on" the entire week won't drive me insane by Friday. It's always a danger.

The last catch-phrase is the most interesting, because school has always been designed to put the onus of failure on kids rather than on teachers. Saying that failure is not an option seems at first glance to put extra pressure on the kids. That would be counter-productive; extra stress does not lead to better work as a general rule. So what does it mean?

Teachers need to believe that all students can learn. All of them, no exceptions. Now, they may not be able to learn in quite the same ways or at quite the same speed, but they can all learn. So if they don't learn, it's the teacher's job to figure out why. Does the material need to be presented a different way to accommodate a different learning style? Did you start the material at too advanced a level, and they'd be able to do it if you rolled it back a bit? Is there a specific part of the material that is causing a roadblock? You want to set the goals well enough that every student can meet them with support, and for most students, the goals should be just this side of challenging. The key to meeting high expectations is to offer high support; high expectations without high support is setting kids up for failure.