Eskimo

I'm writing this from our empty classroom, where I sit alone for the last time. It's my last day of student-teaching. With two class periods down, I've shocked some of the kids who have only just realized (even though I've told them for weeks) that I won't be back after today. And while some of them are probably not too sad to see me go (I've warned them that the work load I've given them won't stop when I leave - I wasn't the one telling me what to plan, you know), most of them have this look of "please don't leave us" on their young faces.

That look always makes it so hard to leave them.

I asked an education professor once if there was a way to separate our human emotions from our teacher emotions - the same way hospice nurses do. And she said that, unfortunately, it's impossible. After all, how will you ever be effective if you chose to remain detached, unfeeling, disconnected?  This is not the sort of job that you leave in a drawer when you go home at night. Your dealings are not with boxes and paperwork; you are placed in charge of that most delicate of products - human souls. Their young images flash across your mind as you think about something brilliant that they said, something funny that they did, some character trait that you wish you didn't see developing at their tender ages. You can't help but be "all-in" - totally invested, totally submerged. And when you leave, you can't help but leave a bit of your heart with those kids who have taken so much of your thought and energy.

I remember watching the kids on my last day at my last field experience, a seventh-grade class. I remember thinking as I watched them, bent over their work, "What will happen to them?" Where will these tender little souls end up? I don't see my juniors and seniors with the same innocence beaming from them - so many of them are so hard and cynical already. But I still can't help but wonder what will become of them. They're still so young, so early in their lives, and yet they already feel so beaten-down by their experience. Most of my students are seniors, which means they're heading off to...something, whether it's college or the army or the work force or their parents' basements. And I can't help but wonder about where they'll go, what they'll do, who they'll become after our lives part ways, them spiraling off to one uncertain future and me to another.

My next class is coming in, and I have to pass out the cookies that I baked for them. I will think of you at first, my kiddos - those thoughts will fade, but for now you will come to mind often as I think of you, pray for you, miss some of your cheerful spirits and the smiles that you gave to me in the most trying few months of my life. Thank you for being my first classes. Thank you for bearing with me as we learned together and stuck it out in a place where neither of us wanted to be.

Thank you for making my last semester of college one to remember.