School-Year Elegy

How do we celebrate the end of a year like this one?

Here in Oakland, land of billionaires and homeless encampments and a good many rainbows in windows, there are six days left in the school year. Tomorrow, my graduate students will have their final class. This year, I will not be baking rice krispie treats for them (rice krispie treats are my love language). As I wrote earlier in the semester, I have been grieving for the teaching I did not get to do this spring. You are all likely grieving too - if not for your own teaching than for the stages your children didn’t get to walk across, the progress your clients didn’t make, the summer vacations you aren’t going to take.

If you work in schools or are a student (one or both have been true for me every dang year since the age of two), you are used to feeling a certain way this time of year. There is a mixture of excitement, exhaustion, and bittersweetness that marks the months of May and June for us. It’s an adrenaline I have come to associate with the change in weather - this cresting wave in my chest that means something is ending and something else is beginning.

All school year you slave away building a beautiful house. You draw up the plans, get the materials, work rain or shine, nights and weekends, to install the wiring and nail down the shingles, and on ‘treat days,’ hang up you artwork and select some cozy accent pillows. It is coming together nicely. Then in late spring, you remember that your house is going to be put on the market soon. You scramble to add on the finishing touches - maybe you drag a dresser against an unseemly wall or throw a tasteful rug over a stain on the floor that may or may not be blood. And then it’s time. You take one last look at what you’ve done - only you know the full extent of the joy and failure and faith that went into it. You open the doors, you invite in the people, you beam with pride, you close the deal, you give a few professional hugs. You go out and spend a little bit of your commission on a too-expensive dinner and a pair of impractical fashion sandals that will surely give you blisters, and you breath a weeks-long sigh of relief. You fucking did it. In the fall, you will build another house. You are better at it than you were a year ago. But for now, you can forget all about houses. You can get in your boat and sail the seas of summer and gather your colors for the winter like little Frederick the mouse.

But this year, in the middle of construction, someone crept in in the night, stole our tools, and set the roof of our sweet little house ablaze. This was not the year that was drawn up on our blueprints. This was the year that we took shock and fear and stress and turned it into a blatantly substandard product that maybe only a few of our students were really able to access, literally and figuratively. Some of us made some beautiful things out of this mess. But for all of us, it was still a mess.

This Thursday, my students will not be sharing the culmination of their first ever full psychoeducational assessment (anyone else get tingles when they write that phrase? no?), but participating in what is frankly a much lamer activity. There will be no “have a great summer!,” no awkward-but-festive staff party at the bar (cash bar of course, we’re in education!) where the principal has one-and-a-half beers and lets some juicy gossip about the P.E. teacher slip. For the first time in almost 20 years, I will not be going back to the east coast to see my family. I do not know when I will do that again.

The ice-cream-truck scene at our family beach is always poppin’

But there will be something. The last day will come. And then the day after. We will be here. And what will we be doing? In response to my lamentations, my wise friend suggests (if you do not have a “wise friend” I highly recommend applying for one) “maybe just really acknowledge the loss of ritual and let yourself feel shitty about it a little?” Oh, that sounds important. Perhaps I will loop the old DVD (don’t we all have a DVD player somewhere?) of my third grade classroom from 2009 over and over and cry. Perhaps I will furiously scribble down all of the things I would have done if life had been different and let myself feel what it feels to name them.

There is time. Not, like those of you who are parents, much time by myself, though perhaps I can collect enough morsels to make something out of once the grades are in. There is more time to cook, to clean out closets, to plant vegetables, to read (“read” is the word I use to describe the experience of starting a book and then promptly forgetting where I put it). There is also more time to contemplate the looming uncertainty of next year, the lack of knowing what kind of structure we will really be asked to construct, and if we’ll be up for the task. But that can wait a few weeks.

And there are celebrations, however imperfect. There are the oysters that are coming in the weekly seafood package we collect from a cooler on a stranger’s porch (I know it’s twee but I did tell you I live in the Bay Area). There is a bottle of wine we’ve saved from our wedding that is likely skunked, but even that discovery would be kind of fun. There is a gathering I just-this-minute decided to host with other educator friends - a hodgepodge of an event where everyone is allowed to say what they are proud of, bake and then eat an entire cake, scream into the screen, whatever they need to do to mark the transition.

And there is summer. The natural world will remind us of this. It does not know we have been so upended. It will attempt to send us its usual warm congratulations. Some days, we will not be ready to accept them. Others, we will look around for a few twigs, a nice-looking patch of grass, and considering building again.

-This NYT piece on Graduation Ceremonies in Quarantine is reaaaaal beautiful

-Nice ideas for higher-ed: How Do We Wish Our Students Goodbye for the Summer During a Pandemic?

-And finally, Oakland’s own first-grade teacher Peter Limata was on Ellen last week and it is just the best thing ever if you need a happy cry…