The end of another school year

What I did on the last day of school

Yesterday marked the last day of school for students and it marked the end of my seventh year of "Life After Teaching."  Thoughts of my classroom and my students cross my mind fairly often and I still have those nasty teaching dreams but most of it seems far away now.  It's on days like this, the beginning or end of school holidays that I give my teaching career a bit more thought.  In retirement I've mentally compared the years to the years I spent teaching at various schools. With the end of this year, I've passed all but one of those markers. I spent seven years at the last school in which I taught. The longest stint in a single school was ten years.

So, today, I'm thinking about all the teachers who have only two more days to go this year.  I'm remembering how exhausted I was at this time of year and how excited I was at the prospect of  being able to catch up on my sleep.  I'm remembering that Richard and I sometimes celebrated the start of the summer by sharing breakfast with a teaching colleague. I'm remembering the former colleague who used to stand up at the final staff meeting and announce how many days were left until we returned to class in the fall. It was meant as a joke but it always made my stomach tighten up just a little.  I remember letting go of the worry and the responsibility of trying to do what was best for students.

With each year those memories grow softer around the edges and today I'm thinking about how different my life is now. The main difference is not living on high alert anymore. The highs when I was teaching were incredible places and they occurred with predictable regularity.  Thanksgiving,  Christmas, Teachers Convention and Family Day, (four and sometimes five days without teaching,) Spring Break, Victoria Day. Odd for a teacher that the highlights of the year were those times when I wasn't in the classroom.  I didn't think much about it at the time.  That's just how it was.  Now, watching my husband and my friends who are teachers, I realize that I was different from them. I liked teaching well enough and I did my best.  I did not love it as some do, never felt I could hardly wait to get back into the classroom.

Of course, there were the in-class highs as well and those memories are still clear and sharp.  There was the grade 8 boy who rushed up to my desk after he had written something and asked me how a paragraph made me feel.  When I responded that it gave me the creeps, he grinned, said 'Good' and headed back to his seat to furiously scribble down more words. There was the grade 8 girl with whom I had butted heads all year.  At the end of the year she gave me a card that said "I guess I was a pain in the ass to you but you were to me too." Knowing her, it was an apology and a thank you all rolled into one.  There was the boy with fetal alcohol syndrome who, one day moved his desk closer to the others in the class to listen to a story. There was the young man who made me a lovely wooden box. I keep my chip carving tools in it still. There was the grade 11 class who, on a prearranged signal, threw paper balls at me, We all had a good laugh; they picked up the paper balls and threw them in the wastebasket on their way out. There were the grade 12 girls who cried when I told the class I was moving to another school.

There was also the outward recognition, the student who sought me out at a different high school and dropped in for a chat, the parents who requested that all of their children be in my classes, three awards for teaching, one provincial, one national and one international.

Despite all these highs there were the lows, the gut wrenching feeling that I had hurt a student with an offhand remark, the feeling that I could never do as good a job as I wanted to, that things could fly apart at any moment, that I could barely keep my head above water. I spent a lot of time worrying about the past and the future.

Seven years after leaving teaching, my life still has highs and lows but the difference in elevation between them is less.  I spend time thinking about the past and imagining the future. I spend many many hours in the present with tools in my hands and I continue to learn. I'm grateful for all the gifts teaching has given me and I'm grateful that I'm where I am today.

I wish all my teaching friends a restful and enjoyable summer. May you find the resources within and without to prime you for another year.