Last First Day

I wake up in a sweat, shaken from the dream where my clock didn't go off and I am late. Happens to me every year at this time, you know what I'm referring to, not an early morning flight or job interview, but that first day of school after an 8-week summer recess. Whether veteran or rookie, we all have mixed feelings of excitement and fear about that day, a day ripe with good intentions and fresh perspectives, for teachers as well as for students. 
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Me : Hi there Andrew! How was your summer?
Andrew (grade 7) : Are we getting lockers this year?
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For me, this year’s first day of school is special in that it is my last.  After decades of gearing up for new students and a new school year when the end of August drew near, I look forward to this coming school year as a 10 month long reflection of the gig that I have been privileged to do for the past 38 years. My past 'first day of school' experiences have been pretty good. As a matter of fact, like a good wine, they have only become better with age. And so it was, last Monday, my last first day of school, a sweet and sour kind of day.
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Me : Well, hello there Grace! How are you today?
Grace (grade 2) : Fine...this is my new school bag and my mother had a baby...this is a picture I drew this morning with my new crayons and my new baby sister cries a lot and my mother is sleepy in the morning....(run-on 7-year-old yakkety yak including insight into Dad's new car and something about her brother finding a snake in the back yard and sleepy mother getting angry because brother brought snake to his bedroom...)
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Throughout the course of the coming year, I will proceed to check off the different 'lasts': last curriculum night, last Halloween parade, last Christmas concert, last parent-teacher interviews, last marathon reading of report cards, and so on. But I will do so with a sense of pride and accomplishment in the knowledge that throughout my career I have done my upmost for the kids I served and worked for. During this 38-year ride and in spite of the sometimes discouraging and disheartening challenges that defied and continues to defy education and educators, I have never lost interest in the educational process nor my desire to do something greater than myself.
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Me : Hi Matthew! How was your summer?
Matthew (grade 11) : Ok.
Me : You happy to be back at school?
Matthew : No
Me: Are we going to have a good year?
Matthew : I guess so.
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"Now, let me tell you how this is going to go down..."

Some of it I’ll miss, some I won’t. Of course, I will miss the kids, the interaction with them, their excitement, and their involvement. They kept me young. I will certainly miss those kids coming in on that first day, with their spiffy shiny new shoes (Derek, my new 3 foot kindergarten minion-buddy came to my office last Monday specifically to show me his new Iron Man shoes...priceless!), their recently cut hair combed and slicked back by their now-you-be-nice-to-your new-teacher doting mothers, carrying their newly bought new-smell backpacks filled with newly bought school supplies, some of them failingly trying to hide their first day nervousness, while others confidently walking in with their looks that say ‘ok, I’m here, what do you have to show me?’. While I have had cringe-worthy moments I would love to take back, I will often be reminded during the course of this last year that I had the chance to make a difference for some of the kids that I have worked with during these almost 4 decades of being their teacher.  Where are most of them now? I know not where. The important thing is that I had the chance to be a part of each kid’s educational journey. For that, I am forever grateful.

For sure, I will not miss the Bonanza syndrome, that is the anxiousness and sleeplessness on Sunday night. Sitting down on Sunday evening to watch Bonanza on TV was a quasi sacred family ritual when I was a kid. The Cartwrights were my heroes. But, who would have thought that even today, after 50+ years, this melodic emulating-galloping-horses theme song, which famously opened the program with a blazing Ponderosa map and saddle-bound Cartwrights, would be embedded in my sorry consciousness and still trigger the mild anxiety that I experienced as a child when faced with the inevitable return to school the following morning? As a child, I loathed school. Interesting if not strange that I spent most of my adult life working in a place I always abhorred as a child. 

Derek's Iron Man shoes... I wonder
if they'd have them in size 11?

As well, I will not miss…no wait, I’m getting ahead of myself here. Let’s wait until I get through the next 10 months before I begin giving people the lowdown of all the entertaining anecdotes that will have punctuated my last year as a teacher, and needless to say an account that would not be complete without a rival diatribe of all the not so entertaining episodes that will have given piquancy to my year and that I’ll be forever missing out on when I eventually withdraw from the education profession. Stay tuned.