It is So Much More Than a Room

Wow. I just ran into school to water my plants and take another armload of personal stuff out. It hit me hard that I would not be the one leading in my classroom for a year. I feel winded. It was ghost townish there on a late Saturday afternoon. Eerie. It struck me more than once that my badge will unlock the doors only a bit longer and my key will have to be turned in. I will have limited access to my home away from home very soon. I will no longer be able to go on a whim to just sit and ponder in my classroom, to sit at my desk and consider what happened the week before or what was bound to happen the following week.

It's a comfort I am not quite ready to let go of. Perhaps it is not just a comfort. My feelings in this moment suggest it is something more intense, more necessary to my survival and identity.

My classroom has always been a room of my own, a refuge even when de-escalating a kiddo in crisis. Even when desk chairs and pencil boxes fly through the air toward my head. It's where I make oatmeal and ramen noodles by the gallons for kiddos in need of something warm and soothing, where teachers stream in on and off all day to steal away a bit of chocolate from my desk drawer, where friends come to get a hug or to complain about some outrageous upper administrative decision, where just about every adult in the building has come to insist I extract a pound of flesh from a student who has just disrupted, where parents come crying or yelling or turn maddeningly passive and give up, where my students let me in and trust I will help, where recesses are spent when my kiddos are hurt or rejected or just too mean and angry to go out. It's where lots of abuses have been inflicted by my students; all out of anger, frustration and fear. It is where love has been endlessly expressed in so many ways, where little aha moments happen and keys unlock long lasting learning problems.

It is where I found me. It is me. I will miss it terribly.