Moving On

In the Fall there are more of them: visitors from the past. On Wednesdays, our minimum day for students, we get a steady stream of students from previous years, coming back to poke around the old school to see what changes have been made. New paint. New computers. New teachers. For many the shock of entering a new phase of their own education, middle or high school, sends them running back to where it all began.
Sometimes they are shocked by what they see. It's always much smaller than they remember, even if they've only been away for three months. And there's always a good deal of whining about what they never got to do while they were there. "We never had computer class." "We never had a salad bar." "We never had tile on the floor." All good observations, but the truth is that elementary school was a safe haven, a port in the storm. It just gets harder from there.
The hard part for me is trying to put names with faces that have lost their baby fat, or voices that have dropped an octave or two. I've got three hundred and fifty new names to keep in my head, and the ones who have matriculated on out of my sphere of influence often leave me just as quickly as they did on promotion day.
But there is one kid that I still look for. He wouldn't be a kid so much anymore, more of a young man of twenty-one. If Denny ever came back, I would know him. He's the one who first came into the computer lab back when it was full of Apple II's and stood quietly by me while I tried to install a program from a set of poorly marked floppy disks. "Whatcha doin?" he asked.
"Trying to figure out what order these disks go in," consumed with my task, I didn't look up at first. When I finally turned around, he was still standing there, watching intently as I clicked and ejected and started again.
"Is that how you get programs on a computer?" Good question for a nine-year-old.
"What's your name?"
"Denny."
It didn't occur to me for a few more minutes that Denny should probably be on his way back to class, or to the office, or anyplace other than hanging around the computer lab. "Shouldn't you be," I tried to remember my bell schedule, "at recess?"
"Oh, yeah. I just stopped by here 'cause it looked interesting."
That was back in my first year of teaching. The next year I instituted an informal chess club in the mornings before school. I told the kids that anyone who beat me got to keep the board. "And the pieces?" asked Denny, always a stickler for accuracy.
"And the pieces, Denny."
A lot of kids came and went, but Denny was the only regular I had. Sometimes he brought his friends with him, and they would stay long enough to learn the rules, a few easy strategies, and then they were gone. Denny came all the way through fourth grade, and into the fifth. Sometime in the autumn of that year, I found a copy of Bobby Fischer's book and loaned it to him, mostly so he could look at the diagrams of various moves and mates.
When April rolled around, I started thinking about Denny moving on to middle school, and I asked him if he still had the chess book. "I haven't finished reading it yet," he told me, and I knew that he wasn't just looking at the pictures. It was later that month that he finally beat me. He use one of the easy mates right out of the book. I made a big show of giving him the board and every one of the pieces.
Denny never did come back for a visit. I heard that he and his family had moved away. I've had a few more kids who showed some interest in chess, but none of them had the tenacity Denny did. Maybe someday he'll come back. Wednesday is our minimum day.