My Last Day of School
originally published November 23, 2023
1.
On the last day of school there were classes scheduled, even though we’d already submitted our students’ grades. It was one of those half-day situations where the high-school building becomes a liminal space: bulletin boards stripped bare, broken chairs and desks ejected into the halls, lockers all but hanging open. At each bell, a smattering of students shuffled in, those whose parents had forced them to show up. Their number dwindled as the day went on. I taught in three different classrooms this year, so I herded this group of kids and that over to the room I shared with Becca, sometimes combining my withdrawn sophomores (gripping their phones tightly) with Becca’s upperclassmen (slouching through Uno or using the whiteboard for Hangman).
Our sadness aside, Becca and I had one of our all-time best work days together that day. Becca was painting a mural featuring an Amanda Gorman quote that was going to hang in the guidance department. She'd conceived of it as an project to do with one of her classes, but it hadn't gotten approved until the eleventh hour. Meanwhile, I zipped around crossing the final items off my to-do list. We put on 90’s music and chatted with the students and colleagues who streamed in and out. That kind of uninhibited productivity and time with your friend make for a rare work day anywhere.
I started out by unpacking the cart of supplies the literary magazine had used for their coffeehouse the night before. Lamps and Christmas lights and microphones and shoebox-full-of-cash all piled onto a pilfered plastic projector cart. I’ve been loading that thing up and wheeling it down to the cafeteria for years! Somehow the Folio kids always whipped up these ingredients every month into a vibrant, earnest, noisy open mic night. On this one last morning-after, I organized it all back into the “Folio File Cabinet” and ran the money we’d made over to the student activities guy. Then I got an email from the Powers That Be that the kind coworker who’d offered to take over the whole operation had been approved for the role. I finished up this sort of Folio How-To Manual that I’d been working on and shared it with her and the magazine’s staff.
I got a lot of hugs. I think the last time I got so many hugs was at my dad’s funeral last summer. A lot of students gave me little notes they’d written me and a lot of colleagues told me nice things about myself and all I could really do was thank everyone profusely. All day I felt a little self-conscious about my emotionlessness; I haven’t cried much since going on my meds two years ago. Of all the side effects, the tearlessness has probably been the weirdest. I’ve always identified as a cryer. Especially tears of joy – experiencing joy used to send me straight to the nearest tissue box. Weirdly, I’m still having panic attacks, though they’re not even close to as intense as they used to be. It’s been hard to get the proverbial cocktail right.
I wiped my laptop and returned it to the tech department. I handed in my keys. I retrieved the snacks I kept stashed for myself in the Writing Center. I slid a thank-you note into my supervisor’s mailbox and Becca and I bopped around to Janet Jackson and at the end of the day I loaded the boxed-up contents of my desk into my car and drove myself home.
Here's Morbius. Last year's juniors named him. He is currently flourishing in my home. We had a lot of plants, and I liked having lamps instead of the overhead florescents... It was a whole thing. In back are the roster folders we were required to hang but the rosters inside would always just disappear after your first absence every year.
2.
I’ve been a teacher for about a decade now. But this last school-year in particular felt like I was bringing a biplane in for a hard landing. Sudden dips and dives and riotous turbulence. Last spring I won the district’s “Above and Beyond” Award to much pomp and circumstance; this fall I spent hours on an application for sabbatical, which was promptly rejected. The Powers That Be pointed to recent budget cuts and staffing shortages (though I heard later that no one’s been granted sabbatical in many years). Suddenly I had an unexpected decision to make: should I drop the idea of applying to the writing programs I’d planned to apply for? Because what if I got into one? Would I have to quit my job? I’d been showing up to my writing sessions feeling depleted for a while now. But was this it? The definitive moment in my life that I was going to choose making a living over making art?
Then we had two lockdowns this year in fairly quick succession; not our monthly drills but actual lockdowns. One minute you’re guiding your students through an activity and the next you’re huddling in the dark with them while minute after minute ticks by on the clock. And then, of course, there were all the swastikas drawn in the bathroom stalls and textbooks. Sometimes during my cafeteria duty, a nightmarish charge of over a hundred teenagers engaged in a feeding frenzy, I would start to have trouble breathing and just walk right out. (I requested a change of assignment for this duty and got switched to – wait for it – the other cafeteria.) One time, instead of grading essays on 1984, I spent my lunch period analyzing the schoolwide detention list and converting its overrepresentation of Black and brown students into an ornate little pie chart. When my students chose to engage with their phones instead of the activity I’d planned for them, I often wasn’t even confronting them about it anymore. I just didn’t have it in me to keep stopping down all day to demand basic human decency. Was I even entitled to such a thing in this place?
I loooooved doing shit like this. No one asked for it, almost no one commented on it, but I had ideas oozing out of my gills and this stuff was so fun for me to make. (Here's that poem if you want a better look.)
3.
Everyone has heard the kinds of stories that are coming out of the school system lately. No one was asking why I resigned from my teaching job. “Where are you going?” my coworkers questioned instead. “What are you doing next?”
“I’m going to write,” I mostly answered. Sometimes I replied: “I’m going to live a less stressful life.” And a few times I just shrugged and said, “I don’t really know!”
Most people congratulated me. A handful even told me they were jealous. The rest regarded me as if my face had suddenly flipped upside-down on my head. (This last category, I wager, is responsible for the endless echo in faculty lounges of that age-old chestnut: “Well, it is what it is!”)
At the end of my last day of school, after I got home, I lit some candles and crawled into a bath. And almost comically, as if I had unintentionally leaned on some kind of lever, a hailstorm of creative ideas began to plink around inside my skull.