Going Back and Leaving All This Behind

Summer has been wonderful! I have a new son-in-law and my step-daughter had a wonderful, beautiful wedding. As her first hospitality event (her major), she did wonderfully and her dad and I are very proud of her!! We spent too little time with our children in St. Louis, but they have busy lives and we were lucky to spend any time with them.

Now I turn myself in a new direction. School starts for teachers on Monday. What a blast! To sit and get for hours on end and hear all the best we have done and all the best we can do and try to believe some of it. I've been thinking lately that those of you who read this must think I am a very negative person and probably wonder why I don't get out of teaching. Well, I am not negative about students; it's the others that make my day endless. It's the state people who have no clues and the tax payers who think we have nothing to do all summer and leave school at three and spend our weekends on our boat.

I like teaching. This is my 43rd year and I still haven't worked out all the kinks. I want to do right by my students. I want to be prepared and I want to accept the challenges they present and take them past the place they call comfortable now. But the hurdles are many and the day is not long enough to make everyone happy. Nonetheless, I am back at it on Monday.

I am leaving behind a summer filled with reading. May I recommend Sarah's Key and Little Bee and any Lee Child you can find? Also lunch and dinner sometimes at the Cottage Grill here in Port St. Lucie? And may I recommend any black and white movie after 1934 and before 1955? There are also evenings sitting outside in the ocean breezes (no bugs) and enjoying a glass of something cold. It was enjoyable to sleep late, eat breakfast, have lunch and then dinner without rushing through any of those meals. I enjoyed emails and texting with friends and family. We took pictures and looked at beautiful plants and sunsets and children and laughed at funny moments--all without the weight of Monday morning on our shoulders.

I've had lots of time this summer to think. I think about Nicholas Kristof and the columns he writes in the NY Times; I think about my friend Renee who gives so much of herself to her profession; I think of my friend Mary who still wants to make a difference for students at Affton High School (somebody please thank her) and my friend Karen who solves all my math queries and always calls with the most interesting issues. I wonder at banks and their greed. I wonder at oil people and their insensitivity to the environment. I wonder about the two students who argued about global warming with me in a pub in England one night last spring. I wonder how they view the world now or if they still buy Glenn Beck's spin on things. I wonder at the wild west of Florida law and ethics. And I come to the conclusion sometimes that we simply must put one foot in front of the other and keep moving like Cormac McCarthy's protagonist in The Road, looking for sanctuary in an inhospitable and hostile environment in the hope that even if we don't make, our children will.

I am promising to you, dear reader, to be more timely this year. I may not always have something to say about teaching, but the broader picture is a classroom in a much more important educational program. I hope we can all learn something this year--something that makes the dark lighter, the burden easier and our love for each other and ourselves more significant.