I’ve completed my 26th year of teaching this week. Twenty-six years in the same school. Twenty-three of those years in the same classroom.
What a ride.
Twenty-five students came into my life in September and now move on to middle school in September.
It’s never easy to say goodbye. I sometimes think that summer vacation exists to soften the blow of saying goodbye to children whom you’ve come to love.
Think about this:
A school year lasts about 280 calendar days. In that span of time, teachers spend about seven hours per day for 180 of those day with their students.
Probably more time than they spend with most of their families and loved ones.
Nearly 20% of their time over the course of those 280 days is spent with their students.
Then, just like that, they’re gone. We may see them again, but other than the occasional former students who ultimately become friends, we see these children who we love in fits and starts.
Never enough.
So today is a bittersweet day. The onset of summer vacation, but the loss of children I’ve become accustomed to seeing every day and loving with all my heart.
It’s hard, but it’s also been the greatest honor of my life to teach children.
At the end of every school year, I gather my students for the last 45 minutes, and we share stories from the year we’ve spent together.
It’s a favorite moment of mine every year. As they speak, I write down notes on their stories, so I will never forget.
A few of those memories included:
I had the opportunity to teach children from Syria and Brazil this year and learn a great deal about their cultures.
I also progressed from being able to communicate with one student via an iPad for translation from Arabic to English to achieving perfect understanding and fluency by the end of the year.
It was a remarkable thing to behold.
He told me on the last day of school that one day, early in the year, I was scolding him for something he had done wrong. The whole time, he was thinking, “This dummy thinks I understand him. When will he stop so I can go to recess?”
The boy is hilarious. When his enormous head of hair was cut during the year, he told me that he looked like a chicken and would now be known as Chicken Boy.
The name stuck.
I also learned in October that another student in my class was fluent in Arabic but hadn’t bothered to mention it to me. Instead of fighting every day with an iPad and Google Translate, we could have been asking this student for help.
I’m still annoyed about it.
Other, stranger memories included:
It’s the first school year I’ve had to keep telling children to “stop hitting the teacher.”
Not in a bad way, but not in a good way, either. Sometimes it’s impossible to explain how the teacher-student dynamic makes sense, especially in my classroom. Things that sound ridiculous, inexplicable, and downright inappropriate make complete sense if you spend time in my classroom, where you can understand the culture, traditions, and love we share for one another.
It’s a crazy place at times, but it works.
Adults who spend time in my classroom come to understand it as well. I worked all year with a paraprofessional named Ellie who was responsible for two students but ultimately took care of all the kids.
Having two teachers in the room is always preferable to having one.
One of my students drew on my head with a marker. Her mother punished her later that night by making her eat Brussels sprouts.
Her mother recorded the punishment for my enjoyment.
I gave that same student Brussels sprouts as a gift during her parent-teacher conference.,
During a test, the tube in my ear dislodged, fouling up my balance and sending me to the floor. Because the class was so focused on their test, only one student saw me hit the ground, and she watched with amusement as I tried and failed to stand up. Eventually, a teacher found me on the floor and assisted me.
One student jokingly kicked her foot in my direction when I irritated her, but her shoe wasn’t tied, so it shot off her foot, hit a pipe on the ceiling, and ricocheted back onto my head.
It was hilarious and surprisingly painful.
One of my students reported having a “terrible weekend.” When pressed, he told us that he had discovered that his brother’s dorm room mattress was softer than his own.
That was it. That ruined the weekend.
I explained to the student that when I was growing up, bike helmets didn’t exist; I had only three channels on a black-and-white TV, drank water from a hose, and my mattress had a ravine in the middle.
I don’t think he believed me.
When another one of my students reported having a bad day, I expressed doubt, knowing that kids often tend to exaggerate things (like the tragedy of the mattress). She explained that her grandmother, who lives in another country, had been attacked by a pack of wild dogs while riding her bike and was hospitalized.
I continue to doubt the veracity of a student’s “bad days” and “terrible weekends,” but I do so with slightly less incredulity now.
One of my students began researching my life and created a document containing every fact she could find about me. Eventually, she started spouting random facts about my life to me, which was deeply unsettling.
“Born in Woonsocket, Rhode Island. Grew up in Blackstone, MA!”
“Suspended for starting a riot upon yourself!”
“Arrested once but picked up by the police at least three times!”
“The first to cook pizza over a campfire in your Boy Scout troop.”
The internet is a powerful force.
I eventually began calling this student “Buffalo,” which is where she was born.
“The armpit of New York,” I told her, based on one trip I made to a Buffalo Bills game years ago.
She referred to me in turn as “Blackstone.” But when she was annoyed with me, she reverted to “Woonsocket,” where I was born. Woonsocket was the armpit of Rhode Island when I was growing up, which she also somehow knew.
I also had an ongoing feud with two students who were inexplicably fans of the Mets. Why these two girls liked such a dreadful team was beyond me, but I had rarely met such rabid fans of that other New York baseball team.
One of my students was a wrestler, and another was a karate student, so we spent much of the year trying to coax them into a battle. Sadly, they refused, so we eventually asked the principal if we could force them to fight to the death.
His response was a simple, “No.”
Every day ended with one student standing by the door, saying, “Goodbye, Mr. Dicks. See you tomorrow. AND HAVE A NICE DAY!”
The last five words were spoken with volume and aggression.
A wonderful way to end my day.
My students also reminded me of the many times I would toss their snacks into the lights, out the windows, and across the room. I am also fond of writing on their bananas and oranges with messages like, “Don’t eat me!” and “Keep away loser!” and “I taste better than you!”
The peel of a fruit makes for an excellent canvas.
My students found these actions outrageous, borderline criminal, but also hilarious.
But that’s the job. My primary goal every day is to make kids love school. Everything flows from that belief that school is a happy, joyous, loving, safe, and entertaining place to be.
I was also blessed this year with a principal and vice principal who are outstanding, highly skilled professionals, but they are tragically undersupported and underresourced.
I suspect that most school-based administrators are.
They never complain and would bristle at the thought of me defending their work and calling for additional resources, but as I watched them work this year, I was consistently appalled by the number of hours required to do the job well and the numerous duties expected of them on a daily basis.
Principals are the hardest-working and most dedicated administrators in any school system, without exception, and they should be compensated, supported, and celebrated to a far greater degree.
School districts would be wise to limit the number of non-school-based employees to an absolute minimum and reallocate those resources where they belong:
Inside the walls of schoolhouses, where students spend their days learning.
If you’re an administrator with an office in some ivory tower and you’re not spending at least a portion of every single day working with kids, you’re not doing your job.
Additionally, why wouldn’t you want to spend at least some of your day with students? Isn’t that why you became an educator in the first place?
Your value and relevance wane enormously as soon as you step outside the schoolhouse door.
It’s why I have never considered — even for a second — leaving the classroom. It’s where an educator belongs.
Every year, I debate whether it’s the year I should retire. I’m blessed with the ability to do other things that I enjoy very much — speaking, writing, consulting, coaching, and producing online content — and they are all far more profitable than teaching. But I continue to teach and will do so next year solely because I love spending my days in the company of kids.
It’s been less than 24 hours since I said goodbye to my class, and I miss them already.
Thank goodness for the joy and peace of warm, long summer days.
They really do make it easier.
