Endings and Beginnings

Today, someone peed on the book bag of one of my favorite students. When he came to my room and told me, I almost burst into tears. This young man is so artistic and clever. He’s always drawing. Always. He’s incredibly talented. He left his bag in the bathroom when he changed for an English presentation (into an Oscar Wilde costume, no less). The saddest part is that all of his sketchbooks were in his bag.

After months of hard work, the last few weeks of public school are pure anarchy. Truly. You can pee on someone’s stuff and there are no consequences for you. It is like ripping a giant Band-Aid off the world’s hairiest man in slow motion (or woman. Gender is fluid). It’s excruciating and drawn-out. It’s what happens when you train young people to take a crappy test, then stay in school for another month and a half. No one tries anymore and literally anything goes. If you are like me, than this makes you angry and sad.

I resigned my position as a teacher largely because I felt like someone was peeing on my proverbial book bag most of the time. I give so much, and in return I get a stranger’s urine on my stuff. A less gross way of saying this would be that I care more about school than it cares about me. As the end of the year drags on, and I take down my colorful room, recycle years of class sets, and back up many GBs of files, I am sad. Most of my stuff I have given away to a good home, so that students will still (hopefully) benefit from it. The things I can’t bring myself to give away I am slowly hauling home, because I’m sure I’ll find a use for a milk-crate full of Play Dough.

As I am sifting through the remains of seven years of teaching, I realized a few things. One, the quality of student work is deteriorating over time. This is a little alarming to me, and it should be for you, too. I can’t help but be a little reflective here and think this is symptomatic of a larger problem in our society. Standards for everything just seem to be slipping. It’s concerning. The second thing I’m realizing is that my stuff—this stuff I’m throwing away, pawning off to someone else, or schlepping home to my nerd-hoard-- is *good*. Usually I am very self-deprecating; now I’m just being honest. I am looking at what I created for my students and I am thinking to myself, “This is amazing! How could they not learn from this?” or, “I’m so proud of me for making that!” or, “I could sell this!” or, “Mrs. Patterson, why are you such a savage?”

(Being called a “savage” by a young person, so far as I can tell, is a compliment).

It is sad to part with years of work and creativity. It is sad that I won’t be there for kids like Ben to give him a place to just sit and be away from everybody while he takes in the magnitude of losing his sketchbooks because some fucking animal peed on his bag. Will my replacement do that? Will he or she buy him a new sketchbook? Will they read “Oh the places you’ll go” to a group of 16 year olds like they’re 5 and change all the names at the end? Will they do an impression of Johan Tetzel selling indulgences or Copernicus publishing the heliocentric theory on his deathbed? Will they tell a joke about circumnavigating vs. circumcising? Will they have “school dreams” where they wake up with a yelp because the frustration is so ingrained into their subconscious that it literally haunts them? I don’t know. I know they will fight a never ending battle with phones, ungrateful students and parents, and policies that make no sense. They’ll throw up their hands when they grade papers again and again because kids can write them again and again, and they do so because they game the system. They’ll work for and wait and hope for changes that don’t come. 

Once, when I was 22 and had no clue about my life, my mom wrote me a note. I still have it, in the very same room holding my cache of Play-Dough. It reads:

I know you have brains, and I know you have courage…I know your gifts and I know your heart, and I know you will be fine.

At this moment in time, when I’m 34 and have no clue about my life, I want to believe that she’s right. I want to believe that there will be enough kids like Ben to cancel out the terrible ones. I want the teacher who will replace me to be successful, to have better jokes and create better activities, to explain and regrade and explain and regrade without flipping out in exasperation or waking up with a yelp. I want them to succeed because our only collective hope is the kids. It’s a slim one, and my grasp is slipping. I don’t know what I will be doing three months from now, but it won’t be Back to School Night. I just know, like Mom said, that I have brains and I have heart. I have never left *any* job without my employer trying to get me to stay. Maybe my path will come back to teaching someday, but it needs to go through something(s) else first.

I will be OK. I have to believe I will be OK. I am a savage, after all.