May always hits me hard every year. For someone who willingly aligned his life with a school calendar and willingly inflicts this torture upon himself year after year, one would think that I would be accustomed to dealing with the pains of this time of the year. The earth itself feels like it will overheat, while many students and adults remain frigid about the mad scramble to complete everything in a timely fashion by the end of the year. The physical world becomes as broken as our mental one, and all of us just try to keep everything together long enough for the fractures to meld back together over the summer break.
But it does not happen just once in May.
Grades, graduations, final performances, exams, games, tournaments, and parades all clog our schedules until we have whiplash from trying to attend everything. The total silence that settles in afterwards is all the more daunting when compared to the previous weeks. I have been lucky enough to work in a school district for the last two years where our senior students graduate around a week before the rest of the school breaks for summer, which offsets some of the jolting nature of the end of the school year, even if it is never easy to see my students leave me. At first I found this practice a little odd; I had always found graduating the night of the last day of school or the very next morning the ultimate end to a successful year. As I lived this experience of graduating earlier with successive years of seniors, though, I found it to be a way to calmly ease our students into the next stage without bringing the whole system of our scholars crashing down at once. Saying goodbye to everyone at the same time is too difficult anyway, and this method of celebrating them allows them to truly see how accomplished and special they have become. Our other students see their work and their journeys as they prepare to reflect and embark upon their own voyages soon enough. The rest of our school is still near-absolute chaos for the last several days after our graduates leave, but I have never been in a high school where that is not the case.
Perhaps I am more sensitive to the shifting of our students this year because I have had a year filled with many unique experiences. A lot of those situations kept me away from updating this blog and from other work that I consider just as important as my occupation. Many of those experiences also signaled closures of periods of my life that I did not even know I was living, yet they came just the same anyway. May for me has always been a time to reflect on the last several months, and I seem to have been almost obsessive in my reflections this year. I took the above picture of my desk as I left my classroom around 5:30 p.m. to defend my doctoral project later in the evening, remarking that if I did not die in the process, I would not be returning to that desk ever again as “Mr. Morris”; that realization encapsulates the maudlin nature of many of the comments I make to myself as I interact with my students these last weeks of school. Even though that night was at the beginning of May, it still represented one of the endings that I have come to associate with this month with ever-increasing frequency as time seems to speed up with age.
This past week we have also tried to celebrate many of our retiring teachers as we help them with this momentous point in their lives. Although I am nowhere near retiring—and if some people have their way, I may never receive a chance to do so—I feel so deeply when I hear them remark that this “was their whole life”. There is such power in that statement that eclipses the sadness upon which it is usually grounded. Something more can be said about the fact that endings are not always about the termination of one thing, like a life or a career, and instead they should be about a transformation into something else. Endings do not replace something with nothing, just something else.
No matter the number of endings that present themselves in May, I always end the month by looking ahead. Those of us who can spend our summers focusing on what is important to us can often structure the coming weeks according to what we want and need, professionally and personally. This summer I wanted a few months to focus on writing and writing instruction, so I have planned weeks of travels and trainings that will allow me to write. I must acknowledge the amount of privilege and circumstance that allow me to be able to do this for at least part of my year, but I would also like to argue that it is necessary for teachers and writers to seek out these opportunities whenever they have the time to do so in order to remember what it is to be a writer. I am not sure that I as a teacher can help you through any difficulties you may be having if I have not recently worked through compositional difficulties of my own. I have always considered teachers to be experts in some aspect of their field, and we owe it to our students to have a life devoted to our content that we can then share with them in our classes.
One of my resolutions for the next few months has been to write more for this blog, too, so please expect more ramblings and wanderings in the very near future as I clear away some of these tears to keep my sight clear for the road ahead!
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