I’m ready to take full advantage of the final two weeks of summer
Two days ago, I drove to school and made my first entrance into the 2018-2019 year. Three eighth-grade girls were there waving at me from the front door as I loaded up my arms with bags from the back seat of my car. The girls were there for basketball practice, which would start in about an hour. Guess they’re excited for things to get rolling, I thought.
As I approached the front door, the girls made a tunnel with their arms. I jogged below their waving hands and we all cheered. It was a reverse, of sorts, of the final day of the school year two months earlier.
That’s when the teachers and staff at my small, rural middle school had formed a tunnel, like we always do, at the front door and cheered and showered the kids with hand sparkles as they made that final trip of the year to the waiting bus.
It was a fun and final moment… the culmination of nine months of planning, teaching, listening, cheering, testing, playing, working, and encouraging. Passing back through the girls’ tunnel into the school yesterday was a reminder that another fun and productive nine months is about to begin.
Once inside, I caught up on summer news with the girls and then made my way down the hall to my classroom. Two other teachers were there, I noticed. One nearly had her room prepared; the other, I learned later, was just getting started.
I dug the key to my room from the zippered pouch inside my purse, and unlocked my room… the first of hundreds of times I will do this over the next several months, I thought.
I clicked on the lights. Every piece of furniture had been moved to one side of the room by the maintenance staff to make room for floor waxing. Chairs were stacked on tables. Desks were stacked on other desks. My kidney bean table– that I used to abhor, but now love, and I’ll tell you why later—was wedged behind the chipped, decrepit black bookshelves left by a teacher who had moved away two years earlier.
Boxes of items I requisitioned last spring were angled on top of the second-hand coffee table that normally holds bins of headphones and clipboards. Floor lamps teetered awkwardly between desks. A giant black trash bag hovered under a table, stuffed with the silk and plastic English ivy I will later use to dress up the bookshelves.
The room echoed as I strode across the tile. I set down my bags, opened a few of the boxes, and looked over at my closet. The right-hand door bulged open a half-inch and I remembered being unable to close it fully on the last day of school. It seemed only moments had passed since that final day when I had tried to rearrange the things inside so the door would fully close. I had eventually given up; the prospect of two months of summer freedom enticed me to just walk away.
I pulled the door open and perused the possessions of my teaching life— books, binders, trinkets from students, folders, a milk crate, rolled up posters, a skein of red yarn, hand sanitizer, Lysol wipes, my golden “good luck” cat that waves from my desk during the year, DVDs, a glue gun, leftover soda from club meetings.
I snapped the picture you see above and decided to leave. For while I’m excited for the school year to start, I’m also ready to take full advantage of the final two weeks of summer. I still have blog posts to write, a book or two I want to read, a short story I want to hash out, a daytrip to take with my daughter, and a guitar to strum around on.
I read somewhere recently that the end of July is the Sunday night of every teacher’s weekend during the school year, when we maximize those last lingering moments of “me” time. It’s time to do just that, I said to myself. I pressed against the door and closed it.
My closet can wait.
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