On the Verge of Year Twenty-Five

The school year we just finished on the front end of summer was a landmark for me. I’ve referenced this before, but just to remind you: When that school year ended, I had just finished my twenty-fourth year of teaching within weeks of turning forty-eight, which meant I’d spent half of my life as a teacher, and all in the same school. There was a wee bit of controversy over this since the school district tried to reward me for twenty-five years of service last year. Since I would like to think their math and/or record-keeping isn’t that tragically off, I’m assuming they included the year I spent working as a substitute teacher. I won't get into my reasons for not counting that year, but I promise they’re legitimate. I will say that one of my reasons is because twenty-five years of doing something is a landmark number in our society, and I’ve been looking forward to reaching that. I don’t expect parties or parades or any special or even perfunctory recognition, but reaching such a benchmark feels like an accomplishment, and I wanted to earn it in real terms instead of using some asterisk of a shortcut.

Now that I'm about to start that landmark twenty-fifth year, I see a natural opportunity for reflecting on a lot of things. How many students have I worked with in that time? How many of them would say I had any lasting influence in their lives? How many wouldn’t even remember my name anymore? How many did I completely fail? 

How many people have I worked with over the years, either as teachers who were on grade level teams with me, or shared students with me in some capacity, or just happened to be members of the same staff at the same time? Did they get anything out of our time together, or did they walk away from whatever degree of collaboration we had glad to be rid of me? 

How many of my clever little ideas or plans wound up having the kind of impact on my teaching I hoped they would? How many of them ended up with me doing far more work than was necessary without achieving any noticeable results? 

How have the experiences and encounters related to education I’ve had over this quarter century made me into the teacher, and the person, I’m about to be for two new classes in a matter of weeks?

There are issues and topics orbiting education right now that I have strong opinions about. What experiences led to my forming those opinions? Why do I think A, B, and C are so wonderful while I have such abject hatred for D and E? What did I learn from those formative experiences, or what should I have learned, but was too obtuse or stubborn to appreciate at the time?

You can see there are a lot of questions rattling around here.

I’ve had the idea in the back of my mind for a long time that someday I’d write a book that would show teaching as it really is — warts, scars, tear stains and all. I’ve even had incidental conversations with my agent about it. (You didn’t really think I’d make it through a post without mentioning her, did you? And by the way, wouldn’t it be some kind of serendipitous poetry if I finally had a book deal come together in the midst of this landmark twenty-fifth year? Cross your fingers….) 

I keep going back and forth on whether that book would be some variety of memoir, or if it would be better to mold all of those experiences into the kind of fictional story that would be much too close to the truth for people outside of the profession to accept as believable. All I know for sure is either one of those would probably involve a LOT of name changes. 

I can’t say I’m actively excited about going back to school, but I’m optimistic, and that’s no small thing at this point in the summer. There were a lot of things about last year that left several people in our school eager to put it behind us, but our building-wide Etch-a-Sketch has been given a significant shaking in the past few months, and as a result I feel the upcoming year has a lot of promise. Plus I’m choosing to look at it that way, which I think will make a difference. 

As I think about all of this, it feels like Year #25 could be the perfect chance to sort out all of these ideas and reflections. Maybe I’ll work through things thoroughly enough to pin down a book idea, or maybe not. But I think the whole exercise could bring some good clarity to my teaching. So as the school year rolls out, I’m planning to write monthly blog posts specifically reflecting back on my career in education, and seeing how it relates to where I am now. I’m not going to blow the doors off any controversial subjects, but hopefully I’ll stumble across some reflections interesting enough to write about. 

For now though, I still have two weeks left of summer. Or thirteen and a half days, to be precise. So excuse me while I go find a way to enjoy the rest of my time off....