Although June 21 is the solstice, Friday June 3rd was the unofficial first day of summer for students at my school. Exams were all wrapped up on Thursday and before I even realized it, the quad had become a ghost town.
Students vacated swiftly and definitively, disappearing like dreams. The courtyard, usually bustling with the activities students do best — eating, sharing videos on their phones, talking about how much work they did and how much work was still left to do — was no more than a silent sweep of concrete and greenery.
The lockers, usually shut neatly, looked askew with their doors left hanging wide open. The library was so empty that when I walked through, I felt a kind of uneasy solitude and found myself calling out, “Anyone in here?” From the back, the voice of a student with a late exam replied in a distant, quiet voice. Outside, it was already nearly 90 degrees in the sun.
In the aftermath of their departure, many of us felt bereft, me included. Don’t get me wrong; we greeted each other with a sense of gratitude — it’s over! — but also resignation — it’s over. It’s not that we don’t want a break as much as our students do from the rigorous, sometimes unrelenting, pace of school life. We do. It’s just that without them, school feels so lonely and dull. The fun of preparing classes, schedules, lessons and assemblies is sharing them with students, hearing what they like and don’t like, thinking about things from their perspectives, realizing our blind spots and omissions, laughing about the things they thought we said that we don’t think we ever said.
The close of the school year is a longed for but bittersweet moment, a necessary interruption in a story that isn’t ever really finished. Learning takes a lifetime. And if the summer solstice comes early, it only means that the September equinox with students is that much closer.
