It’s the end of another year. Last Friday my seniors marched through the gym with their blue-tassled heads bobbing—ideally—in unison, and those of us who had chanted, “Left, right, no—LEFT! No, Bobo, your other left,” at them for the past week leaned back and let them file in one last time without further comment. We knew they’d forget that they get crammed up at the turn, and suddenly all the tall guys in the back of the line would realize that they were too close to each other, but they coped, and finally they walked out of the building for the last time. Or, really, what we only pretend is the last time. They filter back in, for basketball games, to get transcripts, for the banal miscellany of life that we want to pretend, for one day in June, does not make up most of our days.
My first years watching this procession, I was sad to see them go. I’d watch them walk through the gym one last time and think, I’m not going to be used to seeing these kids anymore. When we meet in the future, they will be polite and full of chipper comments about their English classes, where their professors will somehow, because they are, in fact, English teachers, remind the kids of me. Last year, despite having some students I truly hated to lose, I didn’t have that sense. Go on, I’ll see you, was my general feeling. Through the blue-colored graduation and the sea of white that’s the Grand March cotillion, I was detached; I did not have that panic of early years that maybe I forgot to tell them something. And this year, I feel a general sense of the rightness of things. I tried to teach them, and now it’s time for them to go.
Compared to my former glow, this seems callous. I have a Writing Club full of seniors whose work I’ve watched grow since they were freshmen, and it’s about to become a Writing Club full of no one. You could wallpaper Gatsby’s mansion with the love poems they’ve shot back and forth at each other over the years, and you could feed victims of at least one natural disaster with the pretzels and clementines we’ve scarfed down together. On our last day, after I gave them my farewell speech, one of them opened his laptop and started up his music. He played the theme to Dead Poets’ Society, and everyone stood up on their desks for me. That was a good moment. That beat graduation by a lot, because those were kids who were using their own time to do something with words, who were staying after school, standing on desks for me. After a minute, we all realized that in order for the moment to match its cinematic inspiration, I would have to leave the room and never return, so instead we just divided up the rest of the brownies and went home.
It’s moments like these that make me forget the dreariness of March, when everyone in my first period study hall shows up half an hour late, because they just don’t see the point of coming in, or of the week before April vacation when everyone’s so high on sunlight and the reintroduction of tank tops to the sartorial spectrum that they spend their days mainly just vibrating through classes.
Sometimes, though, it’s not just Writing Club that pulls through and makes me relatively glad I’m still a teacher. So in honor of my Writing Club and their ability to restore my faith in humanity, I’ve compiled a list of events from this year that will stay with me beyond the band’s last, off-key strains of “Pomp and Circumstance.”
1. When, after telling me for a week straight that I absolutely had to see his favorite movie, a senior boy got sick of my evasions and declared, loudly, in the hall, “Okay, Ms. Mouse. Today at lunch I am going home, and I am going to get you Knocked Up.”
2. When, assigned to memorize “All the world’s a stage,” one of my seniors simply could not recite it standing still, so we just started walking, and he told it to me as we paced the halls, as if I were listening to Shakespeare himself, one of his buddies walking along, hearing him compose the thing extemporaneously.
3. When I was prompter for the school poetry recitation competition, and I sat in the front row whispering up to a nervous freshman, “You sit on my heart as on a nest,” until the rest of the words returned.
4. When Writing Club gave their poetry reading on April Fool’s Day, and one of my seniors showed up late with a giant coil of rope which he, between poems, attached to a lighting fixture. To my hissed demands to know what the hell he was doing he gave no answer, and then proved himself to be an excellent April Fool’s Prankster by making his prank be no prank at all, besides raising my blood pressure to capacity.
5. When one of the football players in my Creative Writing class asked if he could choose to write a short story instead of a sestina, and then showed me the first thirty pages—single spaced!— of a novel, which I’m only the second person to have ever read.
6. When I gave up and started reading aloud to my least motivated class, and they were suddenly silent as I read them entire chapters of Tim O’Brien, and they then said my favorite thing to hear: the phrase that’s better than I love you, better even than You were right: they said, I actually like this book.
7. When one of the girls I took to England last year mentioned casually and without prompting, that the British Museum was one of her favorite places in the world.
8. When one of my seniors went to jail and came out not only having read the book I half-heartedly assigned him, but five other books too, and could not only talk to me about them, but wanted my opinion on his new tattoo.
9. When one of my seniors went to see Patrick Stuart in Macbeth and he returned to act out the whole thing for me, witches, apparitions, and all, me interrupting, both of us yelling lines at each other like crazy people.
10. When, lined up for Grand March Friday night, seeing them all for the last time as I joined the other senior advisors pinning on boutonnières and straightening ties, I heard something familiar, and looked over my shoulder to see the whole line of them launched up the hallway in a flotilla of white, as one senior, the one who always liked to get a reaction, turned to look at me and called, “To be or not to be, that is the question,” as he headed off down the hall, away from all of this, away from his crazy English teacher who keeps track of such things, who knows he’s going to forget all of this someday, and so will remember it for him.
