I feel small; but so are stars from a distance.
//somniloquencee, “ten word poem”
She looks around her classroom and lets out a small laugh. Laughing abruptly and unexpectedly has always been her way of dealing with feelings she hasn’t quite processed yet, and as she looks around at her now barren walls and empty desks she finds herself at quite a loss to describe exactly how she’s feeling at the moment. A coworker had asked her earlier – So was your first year what you expected? And she had answered after a long moment – Yes…and no. I guess? He had laughed and nodded his head in understanding, which was a bit confusing to her since she wasn’t even quite sure what she meant by such a response. Perhaps that had been his response, too, when someone asked him how he felt at the end of his first year of teaching. Perhaps no one really knew how to respond. That’s what she hopes, at least.
She shakes her head at the recollection and turns her attention back to her workspace – the disaster zone that is her desk area and filing cabinet – which is the last thing that needs to be cleared out before she steps out into her first summer vacation as a teacher. She sets an hour-long goal for herself so that this simple task doesn’t turn into the long, drawn out affair that cleaning out her closet or room at home always seems to become – a job that invariably becomes five times longer than it needs to be because she’s overly sentimental and ends up spending more time reminiscing on random objects she comes across than actually throwing things away.
She makes good headway for about thirty minutes, throwing away old snacks, hurriedly scrawled on post-its and broken pencils (seriously, she thinks, why did she keep so many broken pencils?). She finds a stack of documents she had printed off from some website or another, secondary texts and worksheets she’d planned on using for her persuasive unit but had shoved into a drawer and promptly forgotten about instead. She frowns at them, thinks about what a shame it was that she never used them, resolves to definitely use them next year before she files them away into the appropriate file folder. She finds a few referrals that she had kept meaning to send up to the office for filing but, whoops, never managed to make their way up there, a few phone numbers of parents she kept meaning to call but then accidentally forgot to do so (sometimes accidentally-on-purpose). Her desk is actually somewhat filled with things that she meant to do or wanted to get around to but never did. A graveyard of good (and, at the very least, more organized) intentions. A catalog of the teacher she’d wanted to be. She leans back in her chair, feeling melancholy. Yes, many of her students had come up to her, one after another, saying how much they had enjoyed having her as a teacher, made promises to visit next year, but now she thinks they’re the type of words said during high moments of emotion – empty, platitudes stated on the high rush of endings.
Then she finds a stack of student notebooks that hadn’t been taken home (or, more likely, found their way into the school’s recycling bin) and begins to idly leaf through them. She shakes her head at the messiness of most of her student’s notes but manages to rip out a few pages to use as exemplars for next year. Then she begins reading a few students’ journal entries from the beginning of the year, rereading the notes she wrote back to all 100 of them during that first semester. At the time, as she watched the hours tick by during her coveted weekend and her hand began to cramp, she had cursed herself for making such a lofty goal. Now, though, she’s glad she did it. Her students had read her notes voraciously, more than one commenting how they’d never expected her to really read the journal entries, how awesome it was to know that she actually cared about what they had written. Underneath one of them, she finds a page long note written to her from a student after she’d been sent to the office, a heartfelt apology for her behavior in class. The last thing she packs up is her personal copy of the school yearbook. She spends time looking over her students’ end of the year notes to her, numerous and running over pictures when empty space ran out, heart warmed at the kind messages (though she’ll have to remember to do a better job of teaching the difference between your and you’re next year).
She closes the door behind her and walks out into desk filled hallway, wheeling her rolling cart filled to the brim with books and office supplies behind her. She thinks back to the past year – her dreaded 8th hour, her successful 3rd hour intervention class, the slapdash end of the year yearbook club, the euphoria of her 3rd benchmark tests scores, the disappointing scores on her final benchmark test. She thinks about the hugs and handshakes from her students and their parents, a few tears shed, lots of thanks all around. She thinks – perhaps they won’t visit next year, but the things said in the heat of noonday sun were sincere at the time they were said. She realizes – perhaps her failures were numerous, but so were her victories. There will probably never be movies made about her first year, songs commemorating it, or speeches dedicated to it. She is no great general having just come through a great battle, or an intrepid explorer who has discovered new and exotic lands; nor is she some sort of brilliant scientist who has uncovered a miracle cure or a writer who has penned the next great American novel. But she is here, still standing, proud, exhausted, euphoric and a little wistful, on her last day of her first year, and it feels monumental all the same.
Navel Gazing 