I have no idea how spastic I was for the very first first day of school, but I know that I was crazy looking forward to it. I still think that the first day of school is just about the coolest day of the year. I've been watching my friends posting First Day pictures of their kids, and eagerly awaiting my own first day - one of the most glorious perks of life in academia is that you get a first day of school every year until you retire.
 |
| Buying school supplies is so fun that those of us without kids buy them for other people. This photo from Back to School shopping with my bestie for my church's school supply mission. |
There are calendar years and fiscal years, and different new years in lots of cultures. The Jewish new year is Rosh Hashanah. The Chinese new year tends to be around the beginning of February. And for lots and lots of people, a year begins in January. I can adapt. If someone says ‘that was a tough year,’ I know she’s probably talking about a year that began in January, or perhaps a year bracketed by birthdays – the year she was 22, perhaps. If a friend says ‘Next year we’re going to keep the house cleaner,’ he probably means that as a resolution beginning 01-01. But for me, the year begins in August and ends in May. A year is catalogued not as 2002, but as 02-03. Summer is an extra time, a yearly bonus, a time to catch up with family and housework that the year didn't allow time for, time to research and read, time to sleep 9 glorious hours every night. But no matter how great the summer, no matter how bad the phase of my life, ever since I started first grade at age 5, August has always promised a renewal, a new year, new chances, new ideas, new people. The 3 years after college that I was out of school were good for their own reasons, but when August rolled around and I went to yet another day of work instead of to school, it was not only disappointing, it was disorienting.
I am about to have my 34th first day of school. It will be my 6th first day of school where I teach now. My 2nd first day as a tenured professor. I have had 8 first days since I finished graduate school. My first day of school as a teacher was 13 years ago. This is an auspicious year for me - 13 has always been my lucky number. I am, I have to say, incredibly and unspeakably grateful for every single one of those first days, for the fortune to have an excellent education, to have been able to spend year after year in a classroom, to have spent the better part of my life - and I do mean the better part of my life - learning.
But I can't find words to express my gratitude for the 13 of those years that have been as a teacher, because I've learned the most in that time. I remember a professor in my Masters degree who just seemed to know everything, and I asked him "How, HOW, do you know all this? I will never know all this!" and he said "Oh, wait until you're a teacher. You don't really know something until you teach it." He was right. He was so, so very right. I really thought I knew Hamlet after I'd, you know, written about it in my dissertation. I freaking knew that play. Backwards and forwards. And then I was assigned my first Shakespeare classes, in my first tenure-track job. Re-reading the play to teach it taught me Hamlet. Preparing my discussion notes taught me Hamlet. My students' responses taught me Hamlet. It felt miraculous, recognizing that I'd be learning for the rest of my life, just by doing my job.
Most of us start out each fall giddy with anticipation, ready to MOLD YOUNG MINDS and INSPIRE FUTURE LEADERS, hopped up from full nights of sleep all summer and perhaps in some cases a possible marathon of Dead Poets Society and Mona Lisa Smile. The weeks will pass. The joy will not last. The grumpiness will set in. A student will miss a required conference and have to be penalized. Cell phones will be confiscated in class. Unprepared students will be sent out, and they will complain that it's so very unfair and will possibly even go gripe about me on Ratemyprofessors.com, writing comments so foul as to deserve deletion by site administrators. (Should anyone choose to visit the site, observe the blank comments section on a few of the posts. There were once comments there. I have on this site a fairly good record of the dates I passed out graded papers in years gone by - it is the day before the date of the post, in many cases). Even in Dead Poets Society, there's the red-headed kid not standing on his desk at the end, bitter and angry and untouched by Mr. Keating's magic. There's always the one, at the very least.
 |
| See all the kids not standing? They don't care about Mr. Keating and they didn't appreciate his life lessons. Not yet. photo from http://www.whatascript.com/dead-poets-society.html |
Ideals collapse, and yet they endure.
The summer of 1985, when I was about to start high school, I fell in love with an ideal of Back to School from which I may never fully recover, thanks to one of my teenage girl magazines, probably Young Miss or Seventeen. Whichever one it was ran an August issue photo spread that was all about Back to School, showing red-cheeked girls in sweaters and plaid skirts, in misty fall afternoon scenes of football games or chummily piled into someone's Jeep or Range Rover or something, all friends and laughing with their books tucked under their arms. I was completely in love with it. I paged through it breathlessly, soaking in that this was what school would feel like - it would feel like this felt - forgetting entirely that I was in south Georgia and it would be fully January before we had anything that could be considered sweater weather (I usually got a single sweater at Christmas, since it wasn't like you'd get much wear out of more than that). When those realities began to sink in, as the fall wore on and it was hot and I didn't have very many friends and certainly no Jeeps to hang around on, I had to come to terms with the fact that my Back to School ideal would not come true any time soon. But I had a wonderful year, nonetheless. I confess, though, that if you look at my senior portrait four years later, you'll see me in a sweater and plaid skirt, hanging on to that ideal in a faded form, insisting on carrying it with me into my academic future.
The joy and the promise of Back to School is an ideal, and ideals fall apart when we get close to them, like meeting your favorite movie star and realizing he's not as brilliant or funny as the characters he plays, but is still a nice guy. The ideal of Back to School is a heady one for academics. And we do carry it with us, because for all that my first fall of high school did not turn out to be a teen magazine spread, I made some new friends and football games were fun, and over the years there were cars to pile into and girls to laugh with as we walked from class to class with our books tucked under our arms. Ideals are useful. They teach us what we want. They are an anchor for us when we're spinning, a home to which we can return when reality devolves into brown Christmases and grade complaints.
 |
| With my two best friends from high school, goofing around as we got ready for our next big Back to School - in college. Both of these friends just posted on fb the Back to School photos of their daughters. Some realities are better than the ideal. |
The first day of Back to School is so full of promise, and it won't live up to all the promises we force it to make to us. But it's a beginning, a return to an ideal. And in seeking our ideals, we grow and learn, a little more every year.
So when I see students posting pictures of the books they bought for my classes on facebook and twitter, when I see my friends post pictures of their kids in their First Day outfits posing on the front steps with their shiny new backpacks, when my dearest bestie from grad school melts my heart with her annual ode to sharpened pencils, and when my other friends are texting me that they're almost done with their syllabi and without a moment to lose, I get breathless with anticipation. The School Year is Here! 13-14, Babyyyyy!
Happy New Year, my friends.
No comments:
Post a Comment