Graduation

Today is my last day of school. Usually I'm totally psyched for this day to happen. Today, however, I approach the day with a little more sobriety than I normally would. (And no, I don't mean sobriety as in the opposite of bombed, but rather in the opposite sense than gleeful. Just wanted to clear that up.)

This is my first year with an 8th grade homeroom. I always taught 8th grade, but previously I had 7th grade homerooms. And sure I was sad to see the 8th graders leave, but there was, I guess, a little sense of removal from all that emotion. Last year, when my 8th grade teaching colleagues retired, I asked the principal if I could take a grade 8 homeroom.

It has been a fantastic year. My homeroom rocked. The kids were funny, considerate, personable and just straight up good. Sure, they were goofs sometimes. Of course I had to tell them off for being jackasses every once in a while. But we "got" each other. I knew they were awesome kids, even if they were having a not-so-awesome-kids day, and they knew I loved them, even if I had to play the heavy or remove some privilege temporarily or something. We all knew our roles, and for the most part, we played them.

Me and my homeroom. It was a match made in heaven.

I have threatened, more than a few times this year, to report all their final averages for their classes as failing. This would ensure that they would have to stay behind in 8th grade and I could keep them for another year. They would chuckle and promise that if I passed them, they'd come back to visit.

I guess I'll have to live with that.

But in all seriousness, these kids have been attending this school since kindergarten. It is high time that they moved on. They are so ready to be done with elementary school. (There are good and bad things to be said about k-8 schools. It keeps them every so slightly younger for an every so slightly longer period of time. That's obviously a good thing. But they really start to feel cramped after a while. Obviously that's a bad thing.)

So, I have to let them go. I will be there today, amidst the 8th grade girl tears, comforting and consoling and telling them that they will be great at the high school and that after two days there, they'll never look back or long for their elementary school days. I'll say all this cheerfully, knowing that it's true. But inwardly, I will be heavyhearted. This is the BEST homeroom a teacher could ever have had. I LOVED these kids.

But as I said...it is their time. Keeping them would be unfair.

And now I'm off. I have an extremely early start to my last day because one of my students called me yesterday after she found out that some of the kids' pictures were missing from the CD yearbook they did. It turns out that the guy who did the CD burning for us (while we were on our field trip) burned the wrong file. It was one of the drafts and not the final project. In my mind, I was thinking, "What's the big deal?" But then I realized that of course it is a VERY big deal for the poor kids whose pictures don't appear in their own 8th grade yearbook. So, I trudged down to Target, picked up a pack of CDs, made plans to meet Tina at school at 7, and start the final burn!

This was after staying at school until 5:00 conducting interviews for a new 8th grade teacher.

Who said the end of the year was easy?

Well....I'm off. Tina and yearbook duty call.