A teacher’s year is quantified by the same measures as a
layman’s year; it divides up by the same three hundred and sixty five - give or
take a leap - then the smaller twenty-four, and more minute sixty, but these
measures are where the similarity ends.
Our year waxes where yours wanes, when you’re in full
harvest of your year, we’re just beginning to plant for ours. When you burst
forth from your winter lull in vibrant, tender shoots of spring, we’re falling
back to earth as exhausted, empty hulls.
It’s been fourteen years since I walked into the first classroom I’d call my
own, a hot, stale room in Durham, North Carolina. Since that day, my September
has become a sacred month, steeped in the woody scent of newly sharpened
pencils, the ink and paper tang of textbooks first cracked open, the reassuring
disinfectant cleanse of bleach and Goo-Gone. Each year, I make that room my own
once again. I nest and organize and stack and wait impatiently for those first
students to arrive. When they do, it’s my first day all over again, and I’m as
excited and nervous and overwhelmed as I was that day in Durham. But as much as
I adore those first moments with my students, what I really look forward to,
the reason I teach, are the day in, day out, small moments that anchor our
relationship.
This year, however, I am untethered, adrift between calendars, unsure of how to
account for my time.
When I agreed to the dark, hulking deadline that looms on my professional
writing horizon, I had to admit that there would simply not be enough of me to
distribute among all my words and all my students.
So, for the first time in many years, September does not mark my return to the
classroom, and fall is simply fall. This September, though equal in loveliness
to all my other Septembers, no longer marks the beginning of my year.
But, like a phantom limb, the old rhythms persist. I’ve been thinking about
what Shakespeare I would have taught this year, how I’d have approached my
favorite extended metaphor in Great Expectations, and I speculate about the
topics my rising eighth graders might choose for their graduation essays. I’ll
be there, in the audience, but that’s hardly the same thing.
The measure of my days has shifted from seven class periods to three thousand
words, and while the smell of my new cherry writing desk is glorious, without
the chemical whiff of whiteboard markers, it just doesn't smell like September
this year.
