My ugly classroom

There's the last time that you will kiss the one you love. There's the last time you will lay your head and pillow and dream. There probably was the last time your parents picked you up and carried you to your bed. We are, by our nature, finite. Our experiences eventually catch up to us.

Acknowledging that this may be the last time we do something can help us better savor the moment. To know, even amid difficulty, that at some point you will do it for the last time encourages reevaluation. You can't spend your day only thinking about how life will one day stop. That would make you miserable. But you should sometimes take that pause.

I will too soon come to the point where I will see my classroom for the last time. I appreciate the transience of my students. They always come and go on different schedules. (Two weeks before the regular education department here closes for the last time, they placed a new student in our classrooms and told us to teach him well enough that he could pass Regents exams.)

I will never again set foot in this classroom that I fought for years to attain and this facility where I've taught for nearly a decade. I have tried to process it in small doses, but mostly I had been attempting to fight against it. And I lost. The bureaucracy was too powerful. The vested interests were too wedded to my facility closing so that the system could be privatized and for-profit. There was nothing I could much do about it.

I get my formal reassignment to the highest security facility and feel no relief. Whatever Higher Self (or awareness of bureaucracy) I possess made it clear that I would not go unemployed, though the letter they sent is explicit that I can ignore it at my peril. This is all the help the state will give me. There was an email to tell us that this isn't a shopping list; we don't get what we want. The week before, I received a canvassing letter to be a human resources representative, which is somehow a grade higher in salary and prestige than a teacher. (Societal priorities may be skewed.) That letter was similarly dire about declining the weak opportunity: do what we tell you, or we will consider that you've formally refused all help from us forevermore. The bureaucracy wants their obligation to help me off their ledger without regard for it genuinely being a help.

I shall spend the summer applying to other positions, predominantly in education, though I know too well the chumminess of educational hiring. (You would be impressed how often the best teacher in the candidate pool shares the same bloodline, surname, or bed as an already established teacher in that building, even before being suitably credentialed.) Without genuine fear of penury, I don't have the desperation that may have impacted interviews a decade ago. I can go into them with the coolness born of knowing that I won't starve and have a fallback.

I haven't taken the time to savor that I will soon sit in my broken office chair for the last time before a computer that Home Office occasionally cripples for the fun of it. Pieces of my room -- my chair, my bulletin boards -- have broken or degraded. I have let them. Why fly in new deck chairs for the Titanic?

My supervisor came into my room and, before parting to begin his day, I reminded him that this would be our last Friday teaching here. One of the education staff -- but only one -- will remain to teach over the summer. Next Friday, I will be here, but it will be to clean my room and erase all signs that I ever used this grass-green classroom with hot pink and tangerine accents. (I did not pick any of the colors but did not bother to request it to be repainted.)

He half-joked that I would make him cry and mentioned that his wife noticed that he seemed on edge, which he had not been acknowledging. I may be as well.

It was only this year that I walked the side road up to the faded green water tower on the property, on a path that cuts through the sort of leaf-littered woods that would have hosted my best childhood adventures. Either after my lunch or when I am done teaching for the day, I walk there and back, processing. At the mouth of the road is a small, artificial waterfall burbling into a pond, itself emptying into a stream, then a lake. Nine years here, and I had not walked to the tower. What else will I miss and never know?

One of my coworkers showed me the trout that make their lives in the tiny pond. I had no idea it was populated.

I don't know that I will cry, but I will feel this loss a while as I face the uncertain summer, knowing that it ends in a more aggressive version of my present job if I find nothing else. If I do, it will be a world whose parameters I cannot quite know.

My proper mourning has yet to begin, but I can have some satisfaction that my process will start in a summer where I can write relentlessly.

There will be new things. I want to say that I understand what they're going to be, but I don't.

I have never left a position that I've held so long. This job has outlasted most things in my life. My tenure at Red Hook Residential Center will too soon become a memory that recedes from my grip.

To my students, there is no real difference. They all have summer school.

The YDAs -- though not the teachers -- seem unbothered. Facilities close, even though this one has survived over a quarter-century. To them, it is akin to transferring from one McDonald's to another -- no difference but the drive. This is a job, but they had no greater attachment upon which to reflect, which may be a better way. I would instead honor my tenure here with grief.

Over a decade ago, I consciously left Maplebrook, a home and a job that consumed much of my life. I don't recall mourning it because they had done spiritual violence by treating me as an indentured servant. I did not know my last day at Questar, only that I came in one day and was laid off. With substitute teaching, every day was the last day, and I was rarely sorry for it. Leaving colleges, leaving other jobs, did not register much. I did not look a final day in the eyes.

There are no tangible souvenirs that I can take from here. Cameras are forbidden. The ones here all inexplicably broke and were neither repaired nor replaced. I was handed one of the cameras -- which could not function for more than a minute at a time -- and photographed my classroom. (The cameras will end up in basement storage and be thrown out in a decade. My recovering them from a dumpster would be a fireable offense akin to outright theft.)

I take apart my room slowly, throwing out a stack of papers here, going through a drawer, pulling down one bulletin board but not the other. To do it all at once, particularly on the final day, would be too sad.

Every year when I leave for the summer, I purge what I can to return to a clean, organized room. Now, I must reduce it to bare bones, stripping off the substance I have spent years knitting around them. Things in my room left by my predecessor -- not much, but some -- will fill garbage cans. Nostalgia is no reason to allow them the journey to the subsequent placement. Empty filing cabinets and barren desks will go in storage somewhere. It is no guarantee that I will use them again. A bureaucrat may place them where she feels there is a desk-shaped hole.

This is an inflection point. Something is going to change. I know the default, the facility to which I have been assigned because there was an English teacher-shaped hole that the bureaucracy was contractually obligated to fill with me.

Other options are still unknown and gradually presenting themselves. They may grow from pleasant unknowns, but they remain obscured as I write this. They are the known unknown. I know that they exist, but I don't know what they may be. Another school calls for a telephone interview, but the commute would be uncomfortable and the salary uncertain. Yet, I will indulge in the interview because it feels foolish to pass up any. They are, if nothing else, practice and my name perhaps landing on helpful lips. One cannot know for sure what will lead to a good turn in one's path.

By Monday, second period, I have ripped down both my bulletin boards -- mine in that they were in my room, but I outsourced their decoration to my students, most recently to a sweet-natured middle schooler.

My garbage was not emptied over the weekend -- motivation here is not outstanding -- so I am reminded clearly of the destruction I have already wrought so the building may sit empty. (I doubt this is cynicism. The state won't sell this facility, only pay to maintain it.)

One of the trainers asked if the school was no longer in sessions. A guard corrected her, then let her know that the YDAs she had come to train all called out. The guards are meant to work until our formal closure on October 17. Only my tenure here ends by Friday.

Soon in Xenology: A new job.

last watched: Bob's Burgers
reading: Peter Pan