Lesson Learned

The last day of school was a difficult experience to comprehend.

All I had to do was handout report cards, and say goodbye. A lot of student's couldn't find me because I was subbing for my roommate. I shook some hands. Some people found me and said goodbye, some did not. There were some surprisingly emotional students, and some students who I thought hated me who just shook hands and seemed perfectly calm and friendly.

Of course there was a party at the bar afterwards but I just sat there, feeling shocked. I left early and took a walk by the lake. It was an incredible anti-climax. After all of that, just a strange silence in my head.

It wasn't until the next week that I really began to think about what had happened.


I started thinking about the arbitrary things that do not matter, the dust on the chalkboard, the hard wood floor, the old knife wounds in desks and the silence of a classroom at 7am on a winter morning.

No matter where you move to, no matter what high school, you are alone in the classroom before the day, left with a silence, and then later with a presence of the students come and gone. Of the missing ones like Dan, the sweet heartbreakers like Genvieve, the ones who are happy and will be successful.

I don't know how to explain it, but basically I learned that everything matters, that we are in darkness but surrounded by light, and that every joke is a tiny revolution.

And everything you do, as a teacher, matters to someone. And it matters to me.