Closing my Classroom for the Last Time

Sometimes life gives us more chapters to write

In two weeks, I will walk out of my classroom for the last time. Two weeks!

I won’t lie. There is a little anxiety there: will I have enough money? Will I miss the kids? Will I get sick of staying at home? Will my family get on my last nerve? Should I get a part time job?

This last year of teaching has been the most difficult and the most stressful. Teaching through a mask, for example, is not something I was ever prepared for. The expectations that have been placed on teachers and students this year have been unprecedented. Teaching is one of the most stressful professions according to a 2013 Gallup poll, and that was seven years before the pandemic.

On top of the pandemic, teaching is very different now than when I started.

• When I started teaching there was no email. No Google classroom, no computers. No Zoom.
• We phoned parents from our landline at home if we needed to talk to them.
• My tests and worksheets were handwritten on stencils and run off on a drum mimeograph machine.
• We had textbooks.
• I used different colored chalk on my chalkboard and assorted colors on my overhead projector.
• To show a movie or a filmstrip, I had to check out a 19” television on a cart from the AV section of the school library.
• Kids did not have cell phones or AirPods. Nobody ever tried to FaceTime a friend in class or take a picture of a test.
• Social media did not exist.
• Standardized testing lasted only one day.
• Teachers could smoke in the lounge.
• Nobody had ever heard of Columbine and 9/11 was just a date.

It’s been a wild and memorable ride. Everything is different now but the one thing that is still the same is kids. It doesn’t matter what school, what grade, what neighborhood, what city — kids are still kids. And for a lot of them, school is the best part of their day.

As stressful as this pandemic year has been, it is the kids that make it all worthwhile and why we teachers keep showing up every single day with our masks and our Clorox wipes.

Will I miss it? I will most certainly miss parts of it. There are a lot of things I won’t miss. But life sometimes offers us a new chapter, a new adventure, and I think I’m ready for this one. It is time to decompress, to relax, to do some things for myself.

To paraphrase Bob Seger, it is time to turn the page.