Our seniors left the building yesterday.
They will be back next Friday for graduation rehearsal, then that evening will be their prom. But I will be gone that afternoon, heading for the 45th reunion of my original class at Haverford, where I am on the class committee.
They will graduate May 29, the day after Memorial day. School will be closed that day. The next afternoon is when my department is honoring me with a reception in honor of my retirement. That makes for a very short school week - 2.5 days of classes, although that Friday I get final fun projects and probably most of the takehome final essay exams (which officially are not due until the following Monday). That means June 2 will be the last Saturday I am still teaching students, because the by following Wednesday evening I will be in Providence for Netroots Nation.
There is no more new instruction. School days are a combination of time to work on those two remaining major deliverables, or looking at videos that we will discuss, but for which the students do not realistically have deliverables. I am also allowing time to study for high stakes state tests in other topics.
Even for sophomores, this week has seen interruptions of instruction for the last of the Advanced Placement exams, including the one for my class.
Next week sees the Maryland High School Assessments. Monday or Tuesday all of my 10th graders will sit for the exam in 10th grade English. My non-AP students will also perhaps sit for biology or Algebra. Because I am administering Tuesday's English exam, that day those students not being tested will be in the auditorium watching a play.
So this may be the last of my regular Saturday morning reflections, because the end is so near, although on June 2 I may at least reflect on the final fun projects.
There were some very good moments this week. Yesterday teachers walked into their rooms to find small vases with a single rose, and a couple of squares of Ghiradelli chocolates. This was a pleasant surprise. Last year's seniors pulled a prank in which somehow a large number of teacher rooms got trashed, including mine. The faculty made clear to the administration how upset they were at what had happened. This year no students entered teacher rooms. One of the faculty who advises the senior class did all the work within the classrooms, and we have so many, including outside "temporary" buildings, that it took her five hours. The students decorated the interior of the building with streamers in the class color (yellow) and with sticky notes on all the lockers. They wanted to make it clear that they were not going to be destructive or vindictive as had been some seniors last year. I think in general the faculty was pleased.
At the end of the day almost all the seniors gathered in one of the concourses, on the ground floor. IT was a coming together one last time in the building. After some usual adolescent hijinks, they finally left the building, some with tears.
I look forward to graduation. My task will be as it always has been, to help line them up before they enter the main space at the Comcast Center at U of Maryland, where our graduations are now held - we need a large space with over 600 graduates.
I could leave after my work is done, but I stay until the end, so that I can greet them when the come out to pick up their real diplomas. I can finally hug some of them, and say goodbye to others.
If we teachers have done our jobs well, we will be able to measure that not in how students due on tests, nor perhaps not even in the colleges or jobs to which they will now depart, having completed their time with us.
No, we will see it in how they have grown, in how they have learned to learn, in their being willing to take intellectual risks.
We will also, if we have done our jobs right, see it in how they act towards other people, in the compassion they can show, in their commitment to a better world around them.
After all, it is not so much that we teach subjects, although at Eleanor Roosevelt High School we do that and do it well. We are teaching students, each a unique individual. Our task includes helping each realize her own potential, opening windows to possible dreams he had not considered.
Teaching is a sacred obligation.
This is the 17th consecutive school year in which I have undertaken that obligation, freely.
I am honored by the the students whose lives have enriched mine.
As I approach retirement from what I have been doing, and not knowing whether I will ever again be in a classroom with young people other than as a visitor, I realize how lucky I have been these past 17 school years.
It is hard to describe to those who have not experienced both the joy and the frustration of being a teacher.
Yes, you may have experienced it from the perspective of a parent, and almost all of you will have experienced it from the perspective of the student in the classroom.
There is something very special about the responsibility, the sacred obligation, of classroom teaching.
For me, at least, it is about modeling what it means to learn, being open to new ways of considering what one encounters, taken responsibility for one's words and actions.
It means letting the students know that I trust them to rise to the sometimes scary challenges being in my classroom can represent.
Ultimately it means something just as important.
I called this a sacred obligation.
As a Quaker, I am seeking to answer that of God in each one.
It means that I have to want what is best for the student, even if at times it puts me in conflict with the student - adolescents are not yet fully developed, although we can see glimpses of possibilities, both affirmative and negative.
Ultimately it means something else as well. This year each day I have had up to 175 young people come into my classroom. I have had an obligation, but also an opportunity. I have gotten to know such wonderful young people. Some may not realize how wonderful they are, but I know.
Each individually and all collectively give me the opportunity to grow as a person, because each gives me a unique opportunity to love.
I do not know any other way to say it.
At least for me teaching is an act of love.
It is my ultimate political action to be sure.
It is also my most basic human action.
Recently someone I admire told me that I wrote well enough despite being a teacher! Here I might quibble. I think I write well enough because I am a teacher, because I have had to open myself up to rejection by opening myself up to giving, to challenging, to trusting when I do not know if that trust will be returned.
Teaching is a belief that there will be a future, that what one does matters not only now but for a future one may never see.
Or as Henry Adams once put it, A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
For the past 17 years I have been blessed by the opportunity I have been given.
For thirteen of the past 14 years I have been in a school where I was given great latitude in using my own judgment in how to live up to the opportunity, to fulfill the obligation of the sacred task of teaching.
The end is coming - at least of my time in this school.
Our seniors now prepare to move on. Most will immediately continue their educations.
I also prepare to move on. Perhaps I will teach formally, perhaps my teaching will continue in other ways, through writing, through consulting, through actions of which I cannot yet conceive.
i hope that my students, current and former, will occasionally touch base with me. Facebook has helped (several hundred former students have Friended me).
Sometimes they will reach out to thank me, as one former valedictorian recently did.
I think now I will reach out to them, to thank them, for having enriched my life.
I have no planning to do this weekend.
I have begun to bring possessions home. Yesterday 7 boxes and milk crates of books. Next week projects from previous years, and materials used to teach, just in case I yet again wind up in a classroom.
What i really bring home will not go on a bookshelf, nor be stored in my basement.
It is the memories of the classroom, the playing field, the stage, the art gallery.
It is the chance encounters in the supermarket, or the coffee shop.
It is the emails, the phone calls.
It is the memories of several thousand young people, and in many cases their families, whose lives have enriched mine over the better part of two decades.
I may be leaving the classroom.
The classroom will always be a part of me, as will the others who share that sacred space with me.
I have been very lucky.
I have been a teacher.
Peace.