Fall

 According to some, Bruce Wayne's father once counseled him with this bit of wisdom: "Why do we fall, Bruce? So we can learn to pick ourselves up." This might feel like love to a billionaire with a borderline personality and a somewhat unhealthy fixation on flying rodents, but when you're a teacher things come out a little differently.

"Why do we pick up after ourselves? So we can come back in the fall." 

Like so many working stiffs across the globe, teachers tend to look at each week as a mini-marathon, with Friday as the ultimate goal to which we all aspire. Loverboy would have us believe that we are all, in fact, Working For The Weekend. I know that they are sincere in this assertion. They're Canadian. 

But with teachers, it works a little differently. Certainly we all hold Friday as a shining light by which to guide our days. Each holiday, three day weekend, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Spring reminds us why we are all there: To shape young minds and count the days until summer. The industry standard is one hundred eighty. Somewhere in January we tend to celebrate the hundredth day of school. This festival is a chance for children to reflect on that rather large number, and for teachers to breathe out secure in the knowledge that they have passed the halfway mark. 

So here we are, at the end of May, having reached the end of this particular string of school days. We will gather our belongings and store those things that belong to the district in cupboards and on shelves with the expectation that we will be back. I have been doing this exercise in mild futility for twenty-eight years and I still haven't found a way to make it feel any less final. 

Because it isn't. Even though the Federal Department of Education is being dismantled, my own school district is fumbling toward next August, with a small percentage of my colleagues looing for extra earning potential teaching summer school. I was one of those people once upon a time. It didn't mean that I could avoid cleaning up, it just meant that I had to move my junk to a different part of the room so that "deep cleaning" could take place before the additional education could take place. 

I do not seek those opportunities out like I used to. I tend to leave them for those fresh faces who are looking to pad their income with a little extra work when the rest of us are making that big slow turn back to fall. That is when we take all those things down from the shelves and open up the cupboards to welcome a new cycle of learning. 

About gravity and the way time passes.