in which we
see a chronicle of history born anew
This is the final installment of the Secret Life of Teaching published at HNN.
By Horace Dewey
I
make a detour when I arrive at school for a final round of faculty meetings to
take a look at the quad. Surprisingly, there are no obvious traces of
yesterday’s ceremonies. Less than 24 hours ago, this space was teeming with
parents, grandparents, alums, and hundreds of students —- some of whom were
wearing caps and gowns and about to dissolve into living ghosts. Today, all
that remains is a sole folding chair. And since it’s brown, not black like the
hundreds that had been set up, I’m not even sure it was here yesterday. The
only sign that anything relatively unusual had happened are the distressed
stripes of grass running horizontally across the quad. The maintenance crew
will take care of that in pretty short order, and this space will revert to a
stretch of silence, punctuated only by the occasional round of elementary school day-campers singing here on summer afternoons,
or administrators walking to and from their cars. Birds and bees will hold
dominion for a season.
I’m relieved it’s finally over. It’s been three weeks since the
seniors finished classes, a period punctuated by end-of-the-year parties, final
exams, the prom, the senior dinner, and other rituals. Graduation is the most
tedious. People typically experience a string over a string of a dozen or so
years: elementary school and middle school, then high school, college, each a
little more bittersweet and dogged by anxiety, followed perhaps by a
postgraduate degree. And then that’s it for a generation. But we teachers
(especially high school teachers) go through the process every year. The
students, the speeches, the recitation of the school song: they all tend to run
together. If anything is likely to be memorable, it’s the weather: hot or
rainy, surprisingly cool or surprisingly beautiful. There’s usually a moment of
genuine gladness at some point in the morning, as we witness the visible signs
of maturity in some of our charges. And there’s often a moment of genuine
regret, too, when we face an esteemed colleague’s retirement, the graduation of
the final child in a cherished family, or a fond farewell from a clutch of
friends who complemented each other so nicely. Any of these people may reappear
at some point, in some perhaps transfigured way. But the uncertainty of such
scenarios, and the certainty of time’s passage, make such moments bittersweet
at best.
It’s
always a relief when you get in the car and head home after such rituals, and
I’m glad to seize a life, however quotidian, that’s truly my own. For years
now, it’s been my habit to come home from graduation and mow the lawn. I think
of Winslow Homer’s 1865 painting “Veteran in a New Field,” which depicts a
recently returned Civil War soldier threshing wheat. Figuratively speaking, my
campaign is over, and I’m eager to get back to my farm.
This
notion of closure is among the greatest satisfactions of teaching. Other walks
of life are comparably cyclical. But I don’t think any afford the kind of clean
lines and closed books that a life in schools does. Many working people take
extended summer vacations, but few of them are as expansive and sharply
chiseled as that afforded by an academic schedule. As we are all veterans of
schooling, this experience is a virtual birthright. But only teachers refuse to
relinquish it.
The
time will come—unexpectedly quickly —when my longings will turn away from
completion and repose toward the rebirth that comes with the fall. In my case,
the longings typically return long before it's time to actually return to the
classroom. But as I make my way from meeting to meeting, from a final faculty
softball came to a final trip to the local watering hole before we all
disperse, I pause to savor the cadence. The present is past. And history will
be born anew.
