When the performance starts to fall apart, I want to cry. I can’t believe that this final act of my teaching career is ending in disaster.
The girls onstage are supposed to be performing Shakespeare in modern English, which we have spent months adapting, memorizing, and rehearsing, but they have been seized by a case of the giggles and can’t shake it.
It happens in the theater, especially with kids.
It’s expected and shouldn’t be a big deal. I’ve seen it many times before.
If I weren’t swamped by thoughts of this being my last teaching experience, my last moments in my classroom, and maybe the last time I set foot in my school, it wouldn’t bother me at all.
Instead, it does.
I sit amongst about a dozen parents, grandparents, and siblings, watching from chairs spaced across my classroom, as the girls on my stage can no longer speak their lines.
I can’t believe it.
Four months of close reading, writing, rewriting, and rehearsals are now devolving into incomprehensible gibberish onstage. The audience laughs in response. They get it. The girls are ten years old and capable of silliness at any moment. This failing performance does not diminish all the work they have done.
I know this, and their parents know this, but still, I can’t believe it.
I want to scream at them:
“This might be it for me! The last time I get to teach! Pull it together! Please!”
I wipe tears from my eyes as the people around me laugh. It’s not their performance that is breaking my heart. It’s the pain of finality. The last ticks on the clock of my teaching career.
As they press on through their laughter, I scan my classroom. I inventory each corner of the room, trying to hold these tiny spaces in my mind in case I am losing them forever. I stare at books I’ve read to the kids, my favorite stool under the flag, and the desk where I’ve spent thousands of hours sitting beside children, helping them read, write, solve math problems, and navigate life.
I turn and look at the photos of the kids stuck to the board. Smiling, happy, silly faces enjoying a year of school with me:
A man who has now been compared to a mass murderer.
I look upon this classroom space that I have made mine and wonder if it will still be mine tomorrow.
When it’s over, parents and grandparents shake my hand and hug me. They say exceedingly kind things. The girls hug me and ask me to join them for ice cream.
I decline.
“My wife is at home right now, copying and pasting blog posts into a Word document so I have proof that my colleagues are deliberately trying to destroy my life by excerpting single sentences and groups of sentences from a larger piece of writing to cast me in a negative light. Or she might be reading the most hateful things ever written about me and her. Full of lies and half-truths and threats. So I should probably go home.”
I don’t say any of this, of course. Even if I had wanted to, I’m not allowed, though that order from Paul seems hollow now.
What control does he have over my free speech — both on my blog and in real life?
Instead, I tell my students that I’m tired, which is also true.
I suddenly feel like I have a million pounds on my back.
You're such a good writer Matthew. Reading this I felt your anguish.