[This week’s guest blogger is Dan Meyer, a 21-yo student teacher from Sacramento who doesn’t know what he wants to be when he grows up.]

I forgot my lunch on the first day of school. My first act as a high school teacher – just take the stupid lunch sack (which I prepared the night before) out of the fridge and put it into the Eddie Bauer messenger bag (which I bought the day before) – and I blew it. This is a great sign. Confidence surges through my body, threatens to consume me.

I tried to navigate my way to Florin through Sacramento’s highway system, which by design is unnavigable by any being less capable than the Space Shuttle Columbia, and got lost only once.

I pulled into a lot marked “Faculty” and I looked around nervously for the angry parking guard until I remembered, holy crap, I’m faculty!

I’m not faculty.

It’s only a matter of time before I’m found out. The athletic director said “You look young,” within twenty seconds of meeting me, and it felt less like an observation than an interrogation. But I’m not worried about the teachers; it’s the kids that’ll be smelling blood in the water. They’ll see my scuffed shoes, wrinkled pants, and pre-freaking-pubescent face and they’ll see chum. Right now, I’m bloody fish chunks in a cast-iron bucket. On Monday, I’ll be bloody fish chunks bobbing up and down in the great blue beyond.

I arrived at the front office and met people (hi, hi, hi). The principal tried to recruit me for the basketball team and I politely, but firmly, declined.

I was led by a math teacher to the math faculty meeting where I met more people (hi, hello, pleasure). I met my long-term and short-term master teachers, [names redacted -ed]. One, an algebra teacher, was told that I was a new father; the other, a pre-calc teacher, was told that I was a woman. Both, ostensibly, got their information from the same person. Communication between Davis and Florin could be flatteringly described as “shabby.”