Packing up the classroom

Everything is now in boxes in my car. I am looking around an empty room. Goodbye to Room F8.

I'm all done now at Bremerton Freshman Academy. It was an emotional day at parts today. I had some wonderful interactions with my students. Tears were shed.

That's the bad thing about being a teacher. I get these kids thrust upon me in the fall with a pat on the back saying, "Go mold them." I get these kids for a year, with all the interaction and life that happens in a school year. Then, at the end of the year, it's goodbye, all at once.

To be honest, this is one of the best years I had teaching. 99% of these kids were phenomenal and I will truly miss them. I definitely threw a couple of starfish back into the sea (if you know the story about saving the starfish--kids--one at a time).

And I will miss the staff too. This is a profession where people change places often. If I could take fellow teachers with me to create the ideal teaching environment, I would have kept Kevin from my first year at South Kitsap; Steve and Roger from last year at the high school; and Oscar, Mary, and Karen from this year. It is very sad to see them go.

We all had breakfast this morning before going to work. Karen made me a T-shirt with a cool iron-on transfer that reads "NO roads lead to Nome" based on a joke we all shared. At the farewell lunch after school, I was roasted as well. Mary gave me a roll of toilet paper "for all the shit" they gave me throughout the year. I also got a coffee mug with reindeer, another reference to Nome, and an alpaca wool hat that is pretty god-awful ugly but pretty funny. And I will really probably wear it this winter!

I also got some notes from students that I will be sharing. I have to type them out, but they are the kind of notes that I will keep forever. They are just a little piece of proof that what I do matters, even more than academically. One girl said I was "like a Dad."

We are all going on the next grand adventure. Life is an adventure. Every single day, you should get up out of bed and bounce on the floor, ready to wrestle the day. Grab life by the horns and wrestle it down. We use the personal interactions and relationships to make us stronger in order to overpower life and make the most of it. We need our past to make us stronger, the good and the bad.

Now get out there.