A teacher’s life can be measured by a long chain of plans. We plan our days, our lessons, even our free time. Teachers spend their lives helping young people plan theirs. I find myself making plans only for them to be altered.

I walked into my District 75 school in Brooklyn on Sept. 3 planning to build my classroom. I planned on entering the building, seeing my roster, seeing my colleagues, and finally designing the room that eight students and I will call home for seven hours a day. I had to reassemble the furniture, do the bulletin boards, put up posters, and organize my files and the students’ IEP binders.

As I entered the freshly painted red doors, the principal handed me a folder containing an agenda. I visualized the monkey wrench being hurled at my plans, shattering them. The agenda had the usual welcome-back presentation and meetings with assistant principals. But I expected to see classroom setup after lunch on the schedule. All of my careful planning and lists on my Notes app couldn’t have prepared me for this — an afternoon filled with a three-hour meeting.

I had forgotten about the MOSL meeting. I had been selected for the school’s Measures of Student Learning committee, along with four other teachers, to discuss choosing our local measure of the new teacher evaluation system. How could this meeting have slipped my mind? I had taken a course given by Charlotte Danielson, the architect of the framework used in the evaluation system, in preparation for my participation on this team.

After the shock dissipated, my mind wandered to my classroom planning to-do lists. I immediately began thinking about the late nights I would have to work in order to make up for the time I’d be spending in the MOSL committee meeting.

I was anxious throughout the morning sessions and even during lunch. I envisioned the rest of the school having brightly colored bulletin boards and perfect classrooms ready for students to explore, while my bulletin boards showed only exposed corkboard. However, my work on the MOSL committee was more important.

Ten minutes before the MOSL meeting, I met my staff. I had one paraprofessional I’d worked with the previous year, and the other two were new to the 8:1:1 setting. I quickly welcomed them to the classroom. We briefly chatted about our summers, or rather the two weeks between our Chapter 683 summer program and the first day of school. Then, I raced to my meeting.

At 2:50, I made my way back to what I was expecting to be a dreary, bare classroom. I looked through the door’s windowpanes and was shocked to see one para standing on a chair hanging yellow bulletin board paper, a second para laminating the desk plates I bought for the students, and a third para stapling the borders around the perimeter of the bulletin boards. The desks were in the neat rows I had planned, the classroom library was organized, and the computers were reconnected.

I had planned every minute of my day, but I hadn’t factored in collaboration. I’m always the person others count on. It was refreshing to feel that I could count on my paras. They exceeded my expectations and set a tone of cooperation for the year.

All of my plans hadn’t prepared me for teamwork.

Brook Lyn is the pseudonym of a third-year special education teacher in Brooklyn. This post first appeared on the UFT blog edwize.org. If you’re interested in writing a New Teacher Diary for edwize, send an email to edwize@uft.org