Not So Distant Past

 The 2024 school year kicked off for me in a middle school cafeteria. My first day back, along with hundreds of my colleagues, was a PD Day. Feel free to make up your own acronym, but if it ends up having some bearing on "no kids," then you're on to something. 

For the first time in years, we were all summoned to one big hall to discuss English Language Development. We discuss English Language Development in smaller groups often, but the fact that we were asked to crowd into this particular middle school cafeteria as a group of elementary educators was significant on two levels for me. 

First of all, this was our first indoor gathering of any size since 2020. You know, before the pandemic. Since then, most of these assemblies have been coordinated through the auspices of Zoom. Why risk the chance of infection when you can disseminate information via video conferencing? Even during the strike of 2022, we marched around outside, and when it came time to gather consensus from the masses we did so online. 

It was nice to see many of the faces from my past. The ones that had moved on. The ones that had gone off in search of greener pastures. Me? Oh, I'm still where I started, waiting for someone to tell me to move on. 

Then there was this other part: The middle school that was chosen for the gathering of this tribe was the one just a short-ish walk up the hill from my house. The same short-ish walk that my wife would make sometimes with our dog as she encouraged our son to his first period class. 

This was his cafeteria. These were his halls. For three years, this is where he roamed. I had been there on occasion, back to school night and the periodic jazz concert, but this was an era when my son was growing up and away. This was the time of my wife's PTA involvement. My Dads Club membership expired after elementary school. 

I found myself wondering about how he experienced middle school. I tried to overlay it with my own junior high years. How had he navigated the ups and downs, the tardy bells and the occasional bully? 

Did he feel as compromised as I did, sitting in that cafeteria? Waiting for the bell to ring so the next part of the day could begin? 

Was he happy? Did he feel the drag of obligation to sit there and wait for it to be over? I hoped for the former and resigned myself to the latter.