For my friends who kindly read my blogs and deal with my more repetitive musings, I will start by apologizing.  It’s just that I’ve never done this before.  Ok, maybe not never, (which would be double negative), as I have left offices before, before I began teaching.  But that wasn’t a room, MY room.  My home away from home.  The room where I knew every nook and cranny, the room I decorated and rearranged for the best possible engagement until the next year when I decided on a better arrangement.  MY room.

I’ve been checking out social media and teacher sites and there’s this heaviness to leaving our rooms this year.  You see, there is a routine to school, for both teachers and students.  You begin the year with a clean, beautifully decorated room with fresh ideas and renewed energy and STUDENTS.  You end the year, exhausted, needing a break and taking down and cleaning the room you’ve lived in for nine months while saying goodbye to your KIDS.  A lot like birth, now that I think about it. And at the end of this year, there were no kids.

It would be a lot like leaving home to go to college and there is nobody to send you off to your great adventure, or you get married and leave the church and there is nobody throwing rice (or birdseed, or blowing bubbles – you get the idea).  You’ve gone through the motions, you’ve done your job remotely to the best of your ability and – nothing.  No face to face goodbyes, no thank you hug, no “I’ll see you next year!”, no “I’ll miss you” with and from your kids.  You go to your classroom, you take everything off of the walls, you put everything away, you throw things away, you clean off the counters and you take one last look as you leave your home.

You see, a classroom isn’t just a place where a teacher works or teaches.  Of course, it is a place for learning, perhaps more aptly stated, a place where students learn to love learning. A classroom is a place where you give hugs to a student who needs them, or give a tissue to a child who cries or where you laugh hysterically with your kids when one of them does something unexpected.  It’s a place for losing teeth and picking scabs and blowing noses, where kids have accidents on the floor and puke in your trashcan. Sorry – I taught elementary school.  It’s where you tie shoes and bows on dresses and put barrettes back in their hair and bandaids on the blisters made by their fancy school shoes.    It’s where kids share news about new siblings and pets, and sometimes things like their dad left them that morning, or that someone hits them.  It’s a microcosm of life itself and it all happens in MY room.

The first time I walked into this final room, it was still under construction and almost finished.  The last room in the building to be finished because it was a big space and workers could store final projects in there.  You could smell the sawdust and the fresh paint.  I opened every box for every new instrument that entered my room and made the first decisions to place those instruments in spots on the newly hung shelves.  The desk and file cabinets and bookcase were shiny and new and I was the first to put things in drawers.  This week, I cleaned and organized all of those drawers for the new person this fall.  After all, this was my home and I want them to feel welcome.

The room became the place where I ate my lunch in silence for just a few minutes, took my shoes off during a (short) break, it was a place to change before a concert or catch a 5 minute cat nap with my head on the desk before the craziness began again.  It’s a place where you make music with your students, where you bring others in who want to learn how to teach your students.  It’s a place where every emotion comes to life; laughter and tears, joy and sorrow, anger and frustration.  A place to brainstorm and give encouragement, a place to create and collaborate, all within the four walls of MY room.  In the past four years at my last school, in my last classroom, there have been many emotions, some good, some not so good, but even so, much like any family, you never want to leave without making sure you say goodbye and this year, of all years, there will be no goodbye.

For those of you, my teacher colleagues who will return to your rooms in the fall, there is the hope that wonderful memories will be made again in your rooms, with students scurrying like little mice to stations, playing on instruments, singing and dancing.  However for some of my friends, those who are retiring or leaving their classroom for a new school or assignment, this will always be the year of little or no closure and with that lack of closure, the heaviness I’ve mentioned.  I’ve seen some very powerful images this week of teachers preparing their classrooms for the summer and the sorrow is palpable. This is not what we signed up for. I understand that because as I cleaned and left my room this week, completely excited for a new adventure,  I felt that sorrow, the reluctancy to leave my space forever.  It’s silly, right? After all, it’s just a room.