I got the keys from the front desk envelope after two weeks too many days of well-meaning but soul-draining in-service meetings. It's good to be home again -- back in the classroom. This is where a teacher belongs.
It doesn't matter that bookcase cabinets of the classroom had been emptied, moved and reshuffled again or that the color of the classroom flipped from a neutral beige to an edgy palette of dark maroon and the kind of fluorescent green you usually pick up off the floor of a calf pen. It didn't matter that no one seemed to know where the attendance sheets from summer classes were or that some of the students on the roster only existed in the imagination of PeopleSoft. It didn't matter that all the summer projects that had been planned and promised in April had not been delivered. Most had. The rest don't matter. Life is good.
None of that matters when you flip on the lights in the classroom for the first time in the fall and see rows of stacked chairs, polished tables and an unopened package of markers on a whiteboard tray. Heaven. There's nothing quite like the promise, hope, anticipation of the first days of a new school year. It's part busman's holiday and part New Year's Day. It's a clean marker board for everyone. For the instructor, the students, the staff and leadership, a brand new school year is the best sort of gift that summer can give you.
When I don't have this feeling come some September, I'll know that it is time to make that appointment with HR to talk about Wisconsin Retirement System benefits. Some day I know that will happen.
But now. Not today. It's good to be back in the classroom.
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