Matching Tracksuits

Thursday I said my goodbyes to the fourth group of eighth graders I’ve taught here in Greenville. I shook countless hands, gave numerous hugs, and reassured many crying students, all the while thinking how blessed I am to have such an honorable job.

I understood their pain. Endings are so painful when we’re young. Each transition is filled with such uncertainty, and like everyone, I’ve been through my share of painful transitions. In 1999, I was on the verge of tears as a friend drove me through the Polish village I’d called home for four years on the way to catch the train that would take me to Warsaw to catch a flight home. That longing all my students felt only briefly Thursday afternoon was so intense twelve years ago that it eventually led me back to Poland, back to the same village, back to the same students whom I’d left as freshman and returned to as seniors. It was the best decision I’ve ever made.

But I know the secret: we start again. Every ending is a beginning. Every chapter is followed by another, and if we do it right, the next chapter is always better. I tried to tell my students that Thursday. I’m not sure I was successful: no one can ease a pain that’s almost voluntary. Adolescence loves misery in small doses, especially the pain of loss.

I like to think I’m still an adolescent at heart, so now I sit, smiling, looking through pictures I snapped the final day, feeling honored that I had the privileged of working with such incredible kids, wondering what the future holds for those fourteen-year-olds that I grew to love. What do we know when we’re fourteen?

I know many of my students, due to the tragedies and misfortunes they had no part in, know more about pain than I know though I’m twenty-five years older than them. I tried to make the daily fifty minutes I spent with them a pleasant experience, but I know I let them down. It haunts me, and it’s the bitter part of the bittersweetness of the end of a school year.

Thursday evening I met a former student — I’ll call him Ed — who gave me utter hell when he sat in my sixth period class. “I gave everyone hell,” he would say if he read this. “I was just making bad decisions. I just wanted to be bad,” Ed explained Thursday night as he explained the path his life has taken in the intervening three years. I finished that year thinking I’d let him down, swearing I’d never do it again, and now I know I have done it again. And I’ll do it yet again — probably next year.

So I sit, scrolling through pictures, wondering where the lines of these kids’ lives will lead them, eager to get to know next year’s batch, wondering if I’ll ever lose this sadness I feel at the end of school years, and hoping I never will.

How could I, when students leave notes like this on my board?

They enter the classroom in August and they’re strangers. I struggle for a couple of weeks to learn everyone’s name; the energetic talkative ones I get down by the end of the first day. Slowly, I learn their personalities: their passions, their quirks, their fears. By mid-October, I know a group of 80-100 thirteen-year-olds fairly well; by mid-May, I can almost predict their every move.

This is what keeps me hooked on teaching: the relationships. A picture of a group of students is a fairly meaningless thing to anyone but the students’ teacher, but to that teacher, it’s a thousand stories about 180 days spent working, laughing, and sometimes arguing together.

And this is why I consider it a privilege to teach. Between 160 and 200 parents trust me with their children for almost an entire year. In some ways, I know their children better than they do. This can be problematic — “Oh no! My child would never do that!” — but only rarely.

Yesterday, I said goodbye to the kids I spent 180 days with. In a few, short weeks, I’ll begin again, with a new group of strangers in my room.

It is a testimony to how well the year went that I am as excited about starting next year as I’ve ever been. Last year was a tough year, with a tough group of kids. Many teachers on the eighth grade hall said it was the most challenging group they’ve ever taught. “Baptism by fire,” one laughed when I commented it had been my first year teaching there. Last year, the goodbyes were a formality, and I was relieved to have the year behind me; this year, the goodbyes were touchingly sincere, and I was a bit saddened to see the year come to a close.

One young man was terribly upset. I saw him and smiled; he thought I was mocking him. “Mr. S, don’t laugh!” he begged. I went quickly to him, trying my best to smile warmly. “I’m not laughing,” I reassured him, telling him-probably vainly-that the sadness of this ending will transform itself into joy at a new beginning. I didn’t tell him how difficult it was for me to go through endings, how it’s still difficult. Perhaps I should have, but I was afraid I would upset him more. On his own, he will learn to recognize the sweet in the seemingly bitter moments.

If I’m fortunate, he’ll come back to tell me about it.

I’m sitting on the back porch with a bit of scotch and a cigar, reflecting on the day-the last day of school. It ended on a positive note, with a few very positive emails from parents and relatively peaceful final classes. It’s fairly amazing how all perceived animosity burns itself out in those final days and students and teachers alike seem more able to see the positive side of school — not to mention each other — than they have for weeks, or even months.

It being my first year teaching in the States, I did a lot of experimenting. I used in-class journals, Moodle, various writing workshops; I tried different forms of classroom management: some experiments were frustratingly unsuccessful, while others were more effective than I’d ever dreamed they’d be.

It was a year of relearning how to be a classroom teacher. It was a year of relearning all the wonderful things from adolescent psych about what thirteen-year-olds can, can’t, will, and won’t do. It was a year of fighting bureaucracy that I didn’t know existed in American schools. It was a year of relearning content-area knowledge, like how to spell “onomatopoeia.”

In trying to determine whether it was a successful year, I’m left wondering what “successful” means. How do I as a teacher measure success? My MAP test scores were higher in all classes in the spring than they were in the fall. Does that constitute success? NCLB says it does. I had a student who was brilliant and brilliantly troubled, and I never managed to make a chink in her armor so that we could string together more than two consecutive learning-filled days. Does that constitute failure? I taught some vocabulary well enough that some students were referring to other students’ disruptive behavior as “superfluous.” Does that constitute success?

This year I realized again what I’d learned years ago in Poland: the immediate, clear successes are few and far between. But there’s no way to know what seeds were planted. Teaching in a small village in Poland afforded me the opportunity to see what seeds I’d planted, because students would often come back years later and tell me what they were using their English for. Some got jobs abroad because of their English; some fell in love with foreigners because of English; several became English teachers. So I simply have to trust that I did accomplish good, that I did teach the 90+ young men and women in my charge for 180 days something, and maybe even something more than English.