Cycles

I’m sure there are teachers out there who don’t feel the crippling Sunday-afternoonish anxiety of August, who don’t have back-to-school nightmares, but I don’t know them.

It’s not that the anxiety or the nightmares means we don’t love our jobs. These aren’t visions; they are simply part of the cycle. I’ve written about this before, and one thing Becca and I talked about before she flew back to China this summer was how we (mostly) deeply love the cyclical nature of teaching. We must go through this: the end-of-the-year exhaustion, the burnout, the desperation. The giddiness of early summer, the languid July days stretching before us, the early-August unsettling, and finally this: the panic, the fevered dreams. Mine usually involve a class full of every mean student I’ve ever had, the really awful ones. It’s a class full of only those students, to be clear, and in my dreams they become larger than life, terrifying in their insolence. I can’t get control of the class. They don’t hear me. It’s like that first horrible teaching scene in Dangerous Minds or any other dumb movie about teaching. As if the nightmares aren’t enough, during my waking hours I imagine all kinds of worst-case scenarios that have absolutely no basis in reality, but I dwell on them anyway, and soon I’m convinced that even if they’re not actually happening there’s a perfectly good chance that they might. I have hypothetical arguments in my head with people who have no idea they’re involved, and then I feel hostile towards them in real life. (Fortunately, this usually dissipates once I’ve actually seen the person involved, and usually I have the good sense not to mention it.)

There are a couple of ways to get off what my husband calls the hamster wheel in my brain. First, I reread journal entries from the August before my very first year of teaching. I’d just moved into my new apartment overlooking Puget Sound, where I lived alone for the very first time. I had a new pug puppy who ate half a drawer in my new kitchen the week I brought her home. My aunt and uncle lived nearby, but otherwise, I didn’t know a soul, having left my best friends back in Minnesota and Montana. Matt wouldn’t join me for a few more months. I was excited, overwhelmed, terrified, and lonely. I didn’t know what in the hell I was doing. Thirteen years later, I wish I could go back and give that girl a hug and tell her it’s never going to be this hard again. Which is mostly true, although I wasn’t miserable during my first year of teaching. I didn’t have time to be.

The second thing I do is watch episodes of The West Wing. No matter how anxious and stressed I am, ever, it will never be as terrible as being the President. I have comforted myself in this small way ever since Becca gave me a few seasons on DVD after Isaac was born. (I watched the first few seasons at two in the morning, nursing my son in the dark.)

“That,” I say to Matt, “is a stressful job.” He agrees.

And finally, at some point in August, on a day in which I feel I’m clinging to the last moments of our summer, I just have to go to school. I can’t wait until the week before school actually starts, even though I can do most of my planning at home. I have to go in with no real agenda other than spending some time reclaiming my space, remembering that my classroom is, in many ways, another home for me.

But it doesn’t look like home when I return each August. I clean it up before I leave in June: I clear the tables, get rid of all the extra projects students never bothered to take home save for the handful I want to keep, recycle the papers that were never picked up. The photographs of my children, my extra pens, my hole punch and stapler all go into a desk drawer, where they’ll remain safe over the summer. I have the students stack the desks in the back, and then I flip off the lights and lock the door.

The campus was quiet when I returned today. Registration won’t start for another week, although I could hear the marching band practicing down on the field. I opened the door to the computer lab of the English building and smelled the familiar musty scent of carpets drying from their late-summer shampoos. The inner room was piled with boxes and furniture; some teachers are shifting classrooms and are halfway through the moving process. My podium, I noticed, had been dragged in there, too. When I entered my own classroom, I was prepared for the chaos. The carpets were dry, and my desks had been unstacked, but they were scattered, shoved everywhere. My media cart was wedged in the back of the room; the side table on which I keep crates of kids’ portfolios was all the way on the other side of the room. One of my bookshelves was actually standing on top of my desk, still fully loaded with books. (It’s a small one, and fairly light, but still, I had to unload the entire thing to hoist it back to the floor. I didn't mind. It made it easier for me to wipe down the shelves.)

Suzannah and I spent a couple of hours in my room today. I had a vague idea of “stopping in” for a bit, but when I saw the state of my room, I knew I couldn’t leave until I’d set this small corner of my world in order. Suzannah embraced the task of helping me wipe down all the desks and asked cheerful questions about high school. She spends a fair amount of time there with me, and she seems so comfortable with the idea of someday being a high school student (though she envisions herself in my class, loyally selecting a desk near mine -- I do so love my eight-year-old). Today, though, I said, “Hey! You’re about to start third grade! Let’s just enjoy that for now, shall we?”

I tidied, wiped, sanitized, recycled, and rearranged until I felt sweat beginning to trickle down my back. I cleared away little odds and ends I’d meant to get rid of back in June. Suzannah smiled when she noticed the pictures of her and Isaac on my desk.

“How old is Isaac here?” she asked.

“Oh, gosh. Well, that picture’s a couple years old. He’s not quite two.”

“So...that means I’m five. Yep, that’s about right.”

This year, I’ve decided, I will actually add more current pictures of my children to my desk. It’s just that the two I have now capture them in such a beautiful, innocent moment on a lovely summer day, before Suzannah started kindergarten, a few months after Isaac learned to walk. I look at those pictures and I’m grounded, no matter how I’m feeling at school. Returning those pictures to the clean surface of my desk reminds me that every day, the world is new. It’s a good way to feel at the beginning of the school year.

And this is how I transition from crazy to calm, from dread to the quiet beginning of anticipation. From feeling unsettled to feeling optimistic. I begin to remember why I love this, even if I can’t put it into graceful words yet. I begin to remember that it matters, that I am about to return to my place as part of a greater whole.

Today I decided on specific days for planning each of my classes. I have a plan for planning, I suppose. In the meantime, I resolve not to be so crippled by anxiety that I can’t be present in the last sunny summer days with my family. We swim in Lake Washington, eat dinner on our patio, play in the yard. We go to the Elliott Bay Brewery and cross the street for ice cream at Husky Deli. We go to Veggie Grill and eat the breaded cauliflower appetizer off the summer menu. We’ll attend Matt’s company picnic, and the kids will play in the bouncy house and the splash park. We’ll squeeze in another family hike in the mountains. We’ll use up the rest of our sunscreen.

I’ll be ready, when the time comes, to return to my classroom. I always am. Even when I don’t feel it, I trust it -- I trust the process. I remember the sweetness of September. Until then, there are moments left of summer. I know I can’t keep them, but I can hold out my cup and let it be filled.