First Day of School

This is NOT what my daughter looked like on her first day of school

So, for the first time in my daughter’s four-year academic career, I was able to walk her to school on the first day. It was nice.

I can hear my wife now. “Nice?” she would ask, if she heard me describe the experience that way. And I would shrug and say, “Yeah. Nice.” And she would look at me for a long moment, her lips pursed in consternation or mild annoyance or whatever it is wives feel when their husbands don’t express themselves fully and properly, and then she would hmph, and that would be that.

But it was nice.

I’ve missed the last three first days of school because I was either working or living in America or both. This past April, I received my Canadian permanent residency card, so I moved to the Greater Toronto Area to join my wife, seven-year-old daughter, and four-year-old son. He’ll have his first day of school on Thursday with a staggered kindergarten start. And I’m sure it will be nice as well.

It fascinates me, sometimes, just how different Canada and America is even though we share an official language, a traditional start to the school year, and the world’s longest shared border.

When I was growing up on the South Side of Chicago, you knew who your teacher would be next year because his or her name would be on the report card you got the last day of school. On the back of it at the bottom it would say something like: Promoted to Grade Three: Mrs. Hines. I think Mrs. Hines was actually my third-grade teacher.

They don’t do that at my daughter’s elementary school. To find out who would be teaching her second grade French immersion, we had to go to the school and check the list taped to the front doors. I’d say this is some weird thing only her school does, but last Friday I saw a story on Global News Toronto showing parents and their kids doing the same thing at some school in the GTA.

Anyway, when we got to my daughter’s school, a group of parents and kids were already clustered around the list, some with note pads and pens. Somehow, when I wasn’t looking, my wife had smuggled hers out of the house because she knew I would tease her for being the biggest school geek there is. She was just as excited to see the list as my daughter.

Neither my wife nor my daughter recognized her teacher’s name, though (we found out today that she’s new), but they did know a few names of the kids in her class. One name in particular made my daughter happy because she’d just had a play date with her not too long ago.

But back to the first day of school. Like I said, it was nice. My daughter looked very cute. Older. It was kind of scary, actually. She had on big girl clothes: this graphic tee I could see a ten-year-old girl wearing and these pretty cool looking Wizards of Waverly Place shoes. Yeah, Selena Gomez is becoming popular in our house.

And it was so nice to see my daughter so happy on the first day of school. Yeah, there’s that word again, but it was.

All too often last year, the social dynamics of elementary school cliques overwhelmed and saddened my daughter and she came home close to tears. But today there was no anxiety, no disconcerting looks, no fear of the first day. She was smiling ear-to-ear as she and her friend talked, looking like some sort of snaggled-toothed vampire. I’d pulled out her second extremely loose tooth last week so she wouldn’t look like Nanny McPhee anymore, as my wife lovingly called her.

I can’t wait to go pick her up from school today, which me and the wife will do in about thirty minutes. I can’t wait to hear what she has to say about her teacher, how she likes being in a room on the second floor for the first time, and what she thinks of some of the other kids in her class. Most of all, I can’t wait to find out what she thinks of second grade.

But no matter what she says, I’m sure it will be nice.