As teachers say goodbye to the school year

It is nearly the end of the school year, my first year of teaching, and I am humbled, tired, reflective, and panicked. Truthfully, I have learned alongside my students this year.

It is nearly the end of the school year, my first year of teaching, and I am humbled, tired, reflective, and panicked. The feeling of panic was a surprise.

I woke up the other night with the feeling that somehow I needed to impart to my 7th grade students everything they will need to know about the English language in the next three weeks, including, but not limited to: proper grammar, excellent punctuation skills, a deep love for poetry, a hunger to read widely and often, and the confidence to flex their own writing muscles.

Truthfully, I have learned alongside my students this year. Last summer, the head of the girls’ school where I now teach took a leap of faith hiring me to fill in for a teacher who was going on pregnancy leave.

“But I’m just a writer,” I protested, scrambling about in my brain for what I remembered about 13-year-old girls. It wasn’t pretty.

I also hadn’t had a “real job” in decades, let alone the type of job where you actually have to be somewhere every day with every moment of your day planned chock-full of exciting and informative lessons that will shape the next generation of global thinkers.

Helping me make the decision to accept the teaching position was the stark fact of my age. For years I had been thinking of myself as “middle-aged,” but now, unless I was going to live to be 120, I was no longer in that category. I was not just getting old, I was old. Typically, like many of my generation, I have decided not to go gently or gracefully into that good night. Seventh graders would be just the thing — they could benefit from my years of experience as a real writer, and I could benefit from their energy and youthful perspective on the world and their places in it.

I didn’t anticipate that I would grow to think of the students in my English classes as “my girls.” As in, “I wonder how I’m going to get my girls to love this poem as much as I do?” Or, “I wonder if my girls can tell that I hate teaching grammar rules, and would rather have them writing in their journals.” Or, “I wonder if my girls are surprised that they really, really like Shakespeare?” My own learning curve has, at times, been as steep and rocky as a mountain goat trail in the Rockies. (That’s a simile, girls.)

I have felt like a bit of an oddity being a first-year teacher at the age of 59. As a freelance writer for the past 30 years, I have worked alone and fashioned my own schedule. Now (and for the past year) I am part of something much larger than myself. I not only have a desk in the tiny “Faculty Workroom” with eight other teachers (think of it as the bowels of the school, nearly subterranean — containing our cubicles, a copy machine, a water cooler, a small refrigerator, piles of papers and books, and an air of general hilarity mixed with pathos — think of it as a teacher’s version of “The Office”) but I also have meetings. Lots of meetings.

Looking back now on all those meetings, and at various conversations in the Faculty Workroom (what happens in the Faculty Workroom stays in the Faculty Workroom) and at the hundreds of exchanged emails and hallway conversations, I am struck by how the blur of days, that at the time seemed to be an inchoate, rudderless thing, now seems to have been a well-orchestrated, wondrous plan. How did those teachers do that? How did they make that happen?

As an outside observer, with an insider’s perspective, I think I know how it happened, and how it must happen in most schools. Every teacher I have met wants the best for each and every one of his or her students, and works as hard as they can to make that happen.

What a simple thing. What a humbling thing.

Kathy Stevenson teaches English at The Agnes Irwin School in Villanova.