Star stuff

Occasionally one of you will, in a fit of sheer kindness, inexplicably compliment me on something I’ve written.  It doesn’t take very many of these episodes to make me start to wonder if there might be something to it.

Maybe there is, but if so, it’s only relative to my other posts. I’ve seen the light.

I finished my grading this morning at 7:58 A.M.  At 8:00 or soon thereafter someone in the Registrar’s Office was scheduled to throw the switch to shut off our ability to post grades without a huge hassle. So I made it with 2 minutes to spare. Two minutes to sit still and think about the students I’ll never see again.

Over the weekend my daughter Melissa, who is a high-school science and drama teacher (sometimes in different classes), expressed some of my feelings:

This is the great joy and heartache of being a teacher. The students that you inexorably come to love will inevitably leave, and new students will slide in behind them, and you will love them just as much.

Well, “love” is not a word I’d probably use… “like”, for sure, and I suppose in a distant, faint way it might be a kind of love. But I don’t usually think about my students so glowingly. This semester has been different. Maybe it’s because my dad died, irretrievably ending an era that lasted the first 60+ years of my life. He’s not coming back next week, or next semester. I can’t even put off going to see him, because there’s no date to put it off to. Also, maybe it’s because of what is happening to my church, feeling awfully much like another death,  losing something irretrievably, forever.

Maybe these losses are a lens making my students’ departure loom a little larger.

Saturday evening Melissa directed her last play at her high school in Dakar.

… I am like a proud parent sitting there in the audience, beaming at the 40 cast and crew members working seamlessly together on stage. I have to fight the urge to lean over to the person next to me and whisper “ see those kids up there? Those are mine.”

Except, of course, they are not mine.  Or they are only a little bit mine.  its a complicated thing, the affection a teacher has for her students. I am just a temporary steward of their time, a weigh station on their path to adulthood, one of many people who will loom large in their life for a short period of time, and then recede into the background to be forgotten.  And as hard as it is to imagine now, I will forget them too, or at least the sharp details of them. I will remember them in a fuzzy and fragmented way. I will no longer be able to identify them by their handwriting. But all the same, the affection I have for my students comes from the same place in my heart as the love I have for my own kids.  Of course, I love my children much more fiercely than any of my student, but if Enzo and Mateo are the twin suns around which my world spins, then my students are the stars in the firmament.  Each one is still there, twinkling in the night, and it is my hearts desire to be worthy of their light.

Now there’s someone who can write.  See that young woman up there? She’s my daughter.