First-day jitters. I started my day at 4:30 a.m. I really couldn’t sleep; I was restless and stressed, thinking about wanting to make sure my classroom was just right for my students. I’m a sixth-year teacher and tenured, and I still feel like that on the first day.

Here come the students. Students have to come in through scanning, and the scanning process can be pretty long because we are in a building with seven schools. I was waiting in my classroom, and I could hear the roar when they started coming up, like, “OK, here they are!” I like to stand in my doorway and welcome them. The kids are super excited to see a familiar face. I had a lot of students wanting to talk to me; it was a big, happy reunion.

Rules for early birds. When the kids come in, I don’t like to assign them seats, especially because I’m teaching upper-level classes. On the first day, you don’t want to alienate anyone. Then it was really just going over classroom procedures and rules. Like how to enter the room if you are late — that’s very important for my first-period class, because let’s face it, it’s high school, and are high schoolers getting here at 8 in the morning?

The pinnacle of calculators. I’m sort of a techie person, so I love to talk to my students about the latest and greatest in graphing calculators. I passed around the new calculator I got, and the kids were all excited, like, “Can I trade you for mine?” I explained how we’re going to be using this technology in the classroom and the more you get used to using it, the less time you’ll spend on the Regents figuring it out.

Déjà vu. You’re always worried about how the day is going to go, and then you realize, wow, it wasn’t so bad. But I felt exhausted, to be quite honest — I felt great seeing all my students again, but I was so exhausted. After meeting with teachers to plan and getting copies ready, I left school around 6 p.m. and drove home to West Orange, N.J. I have an 11-year-old, so I had to help her go through her stuff and see how her first day was — go through the backpack, cook dinner, and get ready to start all over again.