The end of the school year is such a strange time. A colleague just walked into my classroom to personally apologize for having been in a testy mood at yesterday’s department meeting. I hadn’t felt affronted, but she sat down for a minute and it felt good to chat. We talked about the final weeks of the year, which I believe she compared to . . . the fraying ends of a piece of rope? I guess the rope is the year, and it goes along and it goes along and then, sproing, it doesn’t hold together anymore in a form, but splays out all over the place. There is a feeling of transitional chaos, like ice breaking up on the pond. The white board in my classroom is covered with chicken-scratch handwriting and thick vertical lines: three or four of my advisees were dumping out the whole framework for U.S. History that they’ve learned this year, ahead of their AP Exam tomorrow. It looks like a crazy person has been living in here, sleeping under the desk and drinking from the watering can and sneaking out at night to coat the boards with this dizzying welter of knowledge.
Two of my ninth graders lingered after honors English class today. One of them said to the other that Juliet needed a female friend her age. The other one agreed that was true, but pointed out that Shakespeare wouldn’t have written it that way. “Shakespeare wasn’t a girl’s girl,” she said. The duo paused to weigh the matter. “Dr. A— is a girl’s girl,” one said, naming a male teacher who teaches here. The highest of ninth grade praise.
My colleague’s rope metaphor reminds me of the phrase “losing the thread,” which is also what the end of the school year feels like. Things begin to relax a little and that’s charming, but on the other hand you get in touch with your own tiredness, and you have to keep some kind of decorum going even as everyone’s energy flags, and then there there is this outcropping of small but unsettling to-dos that look ahead to next year: course placements and what books will you teach and the form indicating which professional development opportunities you would like to pursue, and and and . . .
AND the energetic situation in the school building becomes truly bizarre, with the eleventh graders’ hysteria about next year and the seniors’ one-foot-out-the-door energy and everyone’s anxiety about exams creating weird counter-currents in the flow. I firmly believe that the students’ anxiety can be felt by the teachers, and that when the teachers are in a sensitive state, it can get to us. Also the weather has been weird: hot and then cold, not sunny enough in recent days, but gloomy and strangely oppressive.
Since I’ve started writing this, my advisees have crept back in and are adding on to their magnificent creation on the whiteboards. Their patter is soft and soothing: “And then it’s Jackson. . . . And then it’s Van Buren, ‘The Little Magician.’ . . . This is our favorite guy. William Henry Harrison?! . . . He’s the guy who died after two weeks in office. . . . He died of typhoid. . . . Do you want to see the video? . . . Oh?”
I wouldn’t say I dislike the end of the year, on balance, unlike my colleague with the rope metaphor, who has been teaching twenty years and says this time is always her undoing. I’m too excited for summer, too tipsy with the promise of change. As much as I know routines are good for me, I’ve never been able to resist the feeling of bucking one. I used to savor being in the office during Christmas week, when no one else was and you could pad around in your socks like you owned the place. And even though the knot in my chest seems to suggest otherwise, I believe I like being here now, at the end of (school) days, when the ice is breaking up on the pond.