Imagine you're a teacher on a Fulbright Teacher Exchange, going to another country as a representative of your college and your country. You want to make a good impression, especially on the first day of classes. You want your colleagues and your students at the new school to respect you for the professional that you are. No pressure though.

Okay, now imagine the day from hell. Well, maybe that's a little strong. Imagine a day from purgatory. Even that's a little strong. Imagine an hour of purgatory. I think I’ve exercised your imagination long enough. Here’s what actually happened:

Last night, I prepared for the first day of classes by setting out my clothes, getting the coffeepot ready to go, putting my books and supplies in my bag, and setting my new alarm clock. Yes. I set my new alarm clock for 5:45. I wanted to get there early. And, of course, you can already guess that that alarm clock didn’t go off. No. Instead, I woke up to a deep silence. The light in my bedroom was still subdued, so I thought I had wakened before the alarm went off, but I looked at my watch just to be on the safe side: 7:52 a.m. Eight minutes to 8:00! Eight minutes to get to my first class on time! But I knew that it was impossible. After all, Isabel had told me that the school was 15 minutes on foot from my apartment.

Luckily, I had my new cell phone, which I had bought mainly to contact the school in case of illness or some other catastrophe. So I called—or, rather, attempted to call—the Centro de Idiomas. But instead I got a message in Spanish that I wasn’t able to interpret although it was clear that for some reason my call wasn't able to go through.

There was nothing to do but to throw on my clothes, run a brush through my hair, swish my mouth with Scope, grab my bag, and get to school as fast as I could. The walk is all downhill so I was able to go fast. In fact, I arrived at the school and walked into my classroom at 8:08 by the time on my watch (which I keep 2 or 3 minutes fast). Whew!

My students were there, 14 of them, sitting quietly in their seats, as I rushed into the room. I introduced myself as their teacher and apologized for my lateness. I gradually recovered my composure and got down to the business of explaining the contents of the course and how their speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills would be evaluated. (At the Centro de Idiomas, students don’t receive a printed syllabus; instead, the instructor goes over the programa with the students orally and answers any questions they have.)

At that moment, a cell phone rang, and I took the opportunity to ask students to always turn off their cell phones in class. But no one moved to turn off the ringing phone. I decided I needed to demonstrate what I was asking them to do, so I pulled my phone out of my pants pocket and held it up for the students to see. R-r-ring! OMG! That ringing phone was mine! I looked at it as if it were a rattling snake. I didn’t know how to turn it off—I just got it, remember—but luckily it stopped after a few more rings.

What could I do but laugh at that point? It was becoming a comedy of errors. The students began to laugh good-naturedly, too.

The situation reminded me of a workshop I attended once in which the presenter showed how she deliberately demonstrated bad classroom behavior at the beginning of the first class of a term—arriving late, chewing gum loudly, eating a roll, drinking coffee, taking a phone call in class, seeming not being prepared—as a roleplay to start a discussion with students on what kinds of behavior should and shouldn’t take place in the classroom. I was also reminded of my seventh-grade teacher Sister Olivia’s grave warning to her students: that some of us would serve as bad examples for the rest.

At that point, a student knocked on the closed classroom door and asked politely for permission to enter. (This is what students do in Mexico, unlike in public schools and universities in the U.S., where they are taught to enter as unobtrusively as possible--although the unobtrusive part sometimes gets overlooked.) I certainly wasn’t in a position to deny his request nor admonish him for being late, even if I’d been inclined to do so. I ended up saying to him and the class that, beginning Monday, we should all do our best to arrive on time. And then we got down to work.

The rest of the day went well. The students in both of my classes were polite and friendly and seemed eager to learn English. I found out that my phone call during class had come from Pery, who was worried about me when I didn’t show up at the school on time. I also found out that the reason I couldn't make a call on my cell phone was lack of air time. When I bought the phone, I thought I was getting 300 minutes of air time free as part of the purchase, but in fact, I received 300 pesos (about 60 minutes) of air time--the first 100 pesos disbursed at the time of the purchase, and 100 pesos made available at the beginning of the next two months.

I ended up staying at the school all afternoon. I talked with Gabi and Rosa Elena from the Self-Access Center, where I will be involved in helping with “conversation clubs” and reviewing some of the learning materials developed there as additional resources for students. I also worked on plans for Monday’s classes and talked with some of the other English teachers who showed up at the faculty computer room. I was getting ready to leave when I heard the sound of heavy rain coming through the open door of the office. I ended up waiting about 30 minutes for the rain to stop so that I could walk home.

When I got back to my apartment at 5:48 that evening, I could hear my new alarm clock ringing as soon as I opened the front door.