The Strangers All Are Gone
When does summer begin? It begins now.
“That’s a bathroom wall,” my colleague said.
We all looked up. A man in a hard hat was wheeling a dolly down the sidewalk. Balanced inside were several panels of wall board, the outermost of which had a toilet paper dispenser and a period products collection box still clinging to it. They looked strange in the midday sun.
My school is undergoing construction this summer, and nobody has wasted any time. Commencement exercises ended on Tuesday at noon. The furniture in our classrooms had been rounded up for collection days earlier, most of it replaced with bent-wood preschool furniture for the temporary use of the summer camps that will meet there for the next two months. On Monday morning we handed students back their final exams from these ad hoc, gnomelike arrangements. The contents of our teachers desks have been packed away, the desks themselves are on their way to be melted down somewhere, and groups of men in hard hats are trooping around the hallways like tactical scouts.
Usually after commencement, the faculty convenes for three full days of meetings. These are relaxed but, in their own way, agonizing: we are all just so ready to be done. This year, because of the construction, they simply wanted us out ASAP. And voilá: three days worth of professional development and end-of-year debrief were boiled down to three hours.
No one complained.
*
The progress to summer break has a lot of incremental steps. There’s the last day of class for seniors (May 16). There’s the last day of class for everyone else (May 23), the day senior grades are due (May 19), the day finals start, the day you grade your last final project, the day your students take their AP Exam, and so on. I thought my life was going to get progressively easier throughout May. It didn’t, and I’m here to tell you that in spite of all the mile-markers along the path, summer does, in fact, have a finite beginning: it starts after commencement. More particularly, it starts after the teachers (they call us “ten-month employees”) leave the building for the last time.
Sometimes I wonder if my attachment to the academic calendar is toxic. I love it, it beats in my blood, I feel it my birthright. I think this questionable affection dates back to college, with its hopped-up finals weeks and its long winter and summer breaks. You work too hard for a period of time. You put things off, anticipating a big payday of leisure. (I’m not sure that putting things off isn’t part of the appeal.) At the end of the semester you make a frenzied push to the end. And on the other side, your life is transformed. Everything that gave your days shape and meaning is gone, not just for a week or two but for months. You’re “free,” and left to take care of whatever it was you back-burnered.
What did I even like about this? The drama of it. I liked that it was intense, and also collective. I liked the quick changes from structure to structurelessness. Poof! Pow! It just strikes me now that it might not necessarily be healthy. Teachers work too hard for nine months and then we don’t work hard enough for two or three. It looks like balance but it isn’t actually balanced because that isn’t how people experience time: it is two kinds of imbalance, one after the other. There is overload, and then a certain at-loose-ends-ness. The stark shifts in lifestyle are addicting, but a plausible synonym for “intense” is simply “harsh.”
Don’t get me wrong. I love summer break. And I’m aware that I could get a summer job, but I don’t want to. I am just pointing out that the teacher summer is a strange entity that I am still figuring out. It does not feel to me quite like a ten-week block of vacation. Maybe for teachers without kids it is more like that. But also, I think that summer is something that many teachers enter in a state of deficit. And for teachers who have something that they do, or aspire to do, aside from teaching, summer has a push-pull: it is a time to recover but also a time to work hard on that other thing, which gives it a fraught quality. Most people don’t worry about screwing up a vacation, but I feel a palpable fear of screwing up a summer. You could waste the time. You could not set a goal. You could set too many goals, and not relax. You could work hard on a project that just doesn’t pan out. You could return to school unready for the year, practically, emotionally, or spiritually, and be underwater for months as a result. Etc. My attitude is that this time is a precious commodity that is in danger of being squandered. Maybe my attitude is the problem.
At the faculty closing party yesterday evening, another teacher who writes asked me if I would find any time for writing this summer. I told her I didn’t know yet. I have been wandering in the wilderness r/e writing since the winter. I lost faith in my project and now I’m sort of at square one again. I will have to keep you posted.
*
It was a beautiful commencement! The sixty-six graduates wore long white dresses and carried bouquets of red roses. The admin dispensed with an outside speaker, a brilliant choice, and the student chosen to give an address to her fellows really shone.
Every year, people say that this senior class is special. Never again, it feels like, will we have a student who dances as well as that one, who possesses that one’s intellectual ability, who has that one’s artistic talent, that one’s comic timing, or who just warms your heart every time they walk into a room the way that one does.
The academic year ends with a mind-numbing gauntlet of awards ceremonies and special activities. I made a list. As a senior advisor this year, I think I spent around twenty hours chaperoning and formally honoring members of the community. That doesn’t even count the time spent debating with various groups and committees of faculty about which students should receive which honors.
But you know what? It all goes down surprisingly easily when you know the players. This senior class were freshmen during my first year teaching at my school. They sat in my classroom in 2021–’22, when we started the year in masks and I didn’t know much about what I was doing. I know most of them, some better than others, and I am invested in their stories and their progress. Even watching them swan around in nice dresses after a long, hard year is a meaningful activity.
Saying goodbye to my advisory group, in particular, is breaking my heart a bit. This group of girls has been with me for the last three years, since they were tenth graders (at my school, students and advisor “move up” together in grades ten through twelve). Even before then, a lot of them hung around in my room. They are mostly friends with each other, and collectively they skew creative, smart, and quirky. They are very much my kind of people, and it has been strangely affirming and gratifying that they found me, and I them, within the little cosmos of our school.
Suffice it to say that they are is a fantastic group of kids and that we have spent a lot of time in one another’s presence. Much of that time has been passive: I sit in my classroom and grade or work, they sit and work, eat, and chatter; I do some light eavesdropping, sometimes I butt in, we laugh, we revert to our tasks. There’s a lot that I don’t know about them, frankly—sometimes I’ve felt I should forge deeper relationships with them as individuals—but there is also a kind of unique intimacy and fondness that feels genuine on both sides. It has been strange not having them around over the past few weeks. And while they are the only advisory group I’ve had so far, something tells me that they are special, and that they’ll continue to stand out, no matter how many years I spend in this place.
I didn’t schmooze with students or parents after graduation as much as I thought I might. I stood around on the lawn for about forty-five minutes, mostly chatting with other teachers, making jokes about our robes (“Why did I bother to wear a fancy dress under this thing?”) We’d been doing the celebrations and formal leave-taking for so long, most of what needed to be said felt as though it had been said already. But at one point my advisees caught up to me and pressed a gift into my hands: it was a blank book that they’d decorated with fabric and appliqué. Inside it, each girl had filled most of a page with a handwritten letter to me. “It has more pages,” they said, “so you can use it again in future years!”
I guess every job worth doing provides the doer with some prospect of love. Mine has, and I am grateful.
Congratulations to the class of ’25!
Very moving account. Your writing gets better and better!