Another end to another school year. The miles worn into the rubber tires of my Kia Soul, my soul worn out from students mocking my Kia Soul, the laughs I’ve cackled, the lessons I’ve taught, the wheel cycling through its last wrung…

Everyone in every job has a feeling of endings, but there isn’t quite the same feeling as an empty classroom in June when all the birds are singing, all the trees are green and dancing, and all the teachers exhale as they grade final papers to smokey coffee and dream about having actually productive summers.

I lie to myself about this every year–I’ve done so for nine years– and yet two weeks into summer, I miss the classroom. I miss the purpose of waking up to the noisy rowdiness of kids who don’t want to be there, grabbing them by the horns, making them laugh, and if not, making myself laugh and talking about history. Sometimes it’s a useless, feckless endeavor; those days I can see my lectures like stones bouncing off of brick walls, other days I feel like I’ve hiked up (at least part of) a mountain. It’s a familiar feeling, one that I get every year.

Jesse Welles reminds us that “history don’t repeat itself, no, history just rhymes,” and if that isn’t the truth in education, I don’t know what is. It’s a repetition, teaching; talking about the same stories, the same mistakes, the same corrections, the same complaints, the same positives,the same stories, the same mistakes, the same corrections, the same complaints, the same positives (did I get ya?). It’s the never ending spiral up into oblivion of cohort after cohort, generation after generation. For me in particular it’s a religion in repetition: my father was an educator, same as my mother. My sister is a teacher, so am I. My father once taught a student, her child, then that child’s child. A THREE-peat! “That’s,” he says, “how I knew it was time to retire.”

And yet somehow, even where repetition can feel like the rut, feel like this generational aimless divide where grades are inflated, integrity is bleached of nutrition, and students can hardly describe what a book looks like (let alone read one), it is this job that I look forward to year after year, especially in its ending. I often write about purposelessness. That feeling that I could be doing more, that I could be making something of myself, and I am not going to sit here and pretend that I make something of each and everyone of my students, but I certainly will smile while I spend countless hours attempting to.

Summer is the big paycheck for teachers. As my one friend says, “we get paid in time, not in cash,” and it is exactly that time that I look forward to, every year, and fear, every year. Unstructured, no bell-ringing, open time. And every year I loathe and love this open time, but even more so, I think about the next year. What rhyme will this one sound like? How will I step up to it? In the words of Tolkien, “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us,” and I at least can say, I think I decided pretty well, for ten months of the year, that is.

HAGS!