The End-of-School Breakup

[Editor’s note: Ms. D. is the pseudonym for a ninth-grade English teacher in the Bronx who finished her second year of teaching in June.]

I’ll never get used to these endings. As expected, as inevitable, as — well, let’s face it, as longed for as they are, they always seem to blindside me when they finally arrive. How can I yearn for the end so deeply that I can sense the heaviness of fatigue waiting in my bones, and then when it arrives, feel so sappy and raw around the edges with nostalgia for the time before?

Why is it that when I know another breakup is drawing near, every little thing feels so freighted with significance? I feel like I’ve got a Cornell box for a heart (one of Joseph Cornell’s quirky arrangements of symbolic objects) and everywhere I cast my eyes a talisman waits, vibrating with meaning. (Is it only English teachers who suffer this absurd malady?) There’s that pencil floating in the flotsam and jetsam of my desk on this sunny day here in late June, sharpened to a fine point and one inch tall. (That would go in the midpoint of the box, just slightly off center.) Then there are the ultra-vacant chairs, arranged at odd angles, relics of the energy they once contained. They narrate the story of the rush to escape the classroom. The books, open on the desks and face down, are paper birds with clipped wings, earthbound until another student’s eyes set them free. The fingerprints of 120 teenagers cover all the surfaces here in our room, filling the desks like leaves fill the bare branches of oaks in April – each leaf distinct, but part of a greater greenness.

I reflect on all of this as I walk around the desks on a masochistic scavenger hunt looking for traces of my students’ voices. Sure enough, the gritty reminders of what our time together was really like begin to whisper, then hum, then shout. “FUCK THE WORLD” is there in Elido’s defiant and arched letters. When I see Crystal’s dreamy cursive — “Actually, poor people need welfare” — I can’t help but feel that the persuasive letter to a character in a novel may have enlarged their minds a bit. “Love is a lie” could be written by a dozen or so of my ninth graders, as well as the teenager that is sleeping inside me.

“Before this, I was me” has to win the award for the most cryptic desk graffiti, although the more I think about it, the more I would like to see it etched in brass and affixed to the bottom of the Cornell box that is my life right now. In fact, it is the greatest compliment a student ever paid me, if only I could believe it reflects how they feel about our 10 months together, and not just what I long to hear. Can I legitimately satisfy my need to feel that I’ve had some impact on my students by translating this as “I have been so enlightened, so transformed by the books and conversations that took place in this room, I will never be the same again? Complete metamorphosis. Transmutation of the soul. You’ve definitely pushed me out of my comfort zone, Miss. Hey, I learned something here.”

And then there’s the desk that squeaks every time its inhabitant breathes. In Lizzie’s languid script it reads, “I’m so tired….” Back down to earth. Oh yes, tired beyond words. We are all tired of waiting for the doors of summer to swing open and refresh us. So why this wooden box of wistfulness in my chest? I’ve been rehearsing for this ending every school day since September. For 180 days, this room has been filled with my students’ voices, their rapidly growing limbs, their ideas and attitudes, their inflated and deflated egos, depending on the day and their moods. Then the bell would ring and the room would exhale, and I’d watch as they’d all saunter down the hallway to the next class.

My dear students, your daily departure foreshadowed the day the room has exhaled you one last time. You will come back to this classroom next September and peer in the door, but it will be different. You will be more polite, as if entering the home of a stranger. You’ll never own this space as you once did when we spent five hours a week here and you had a desk of your own to deface. Standing here on the shores of June, ready to push off into the sea of summer, this breakup is all about the loss of a shared world.

We’ve had 10 months of communal suspended disbelief. Discussing the made-up world of a novel grew to be as real and granular to us as the Bronx streets outside the walls of our school; we thought through and with these books. We became the idealistic and fiercely independent Juliet, the melancholic Romeo, the embattled, the desperate and the deranged. And then we were ourselves again, sad and jubilant and antagonistic and grateful for little things. We laughed a lot here, in the classroom with the barred windows on the fourth floor of a gorgeous, tumble-down building brimming with students from three different schools. We closed the door and had ourselves a little world, pieced together with questions and poetry and song, and, yes, grammar.

Now here I stand on June 26 amid mounds of silent paper. It’s so quiet in here I can’t hear myself think. I have to say, I’m looking forward to my mind emptying of our little daily dramas, my dreams taking place in milieus other than classrooms. You should know I miss you all terribly. Truly. There is a gaping hole in the middle of the box in my heart, where the wind whistles through. Wait a minute – that wind? It’s sort of, well, refreshing. It’s a breeze, in fact, a breeze that sweeps me back to who I was before September when I could relax and loll around in a field of unplanned days, in my house of fieldstone and daylilies – no bars on the windows. Except I’m not really me anymore, the me I was before last September. I’m more intentional and focused on what is really important for a ninth grader to know about literature and how it connects to the wider world. I’m less apologetic about setting the academic bar high. I am tangled up in a red net of memories. I am way more bushed than I have ever been.

I expect I’ll feel this way again next June and for all the Junes to come for as long as I teach here in New York City. Brain abuzz with oxymorons, I’ll spend the next few days decompressing in this liminal anteroom called late June. “Summer Rules!” is carved into the splintered yellow-orange door. I’ll try to find the me I’ve become this year in this tiny foyer of days. And then I’ll look for her in the more spacious adjoining rooms of July and August. Sage green walls and a periwinkle blue floor. Thick books stacked on a white bench, drifts of sand in the corners. Before you know it, the long hallway called September will appear before me. I’ll return to our room and my heart will go back to being that old anvil, white sparks hoping to catch.

[What emotions do you feel at the end of one school year or the start of another? The comments are open. - editor]

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