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Beginnings
- University Press of New England
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203 p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p beginnings Another school year ends and I am spent. I have almost four months of paid vacation ahead of me—a scandal, I know—but this thought is not enough to rejuvenate me just yet. I feel as if I have been running for eight months and someone, out of the blue, has commanded me to stop. It ain’t that easy. In truth, once I have given my last final exam there are still a few mop-up sinecures. I literally writhe at my desk as I correct the finals, because there are always a few students who straddle the line between passing and failing. I find myself scouring their grades, their attendance, their class participation, their winning smiles—anything to excavate a point or two to put them over the miserable little top into the passing range. There are other epilogs as well. The students who missed the final and come to me in search of a make-up. The ones who, finally , get religion and tell me they understand they didn’t work very hard but have an abiding sense that the quality of mercy, even in a biology course, is not strained. Those who, flatteringly, want to say goodbye. A couple of requests for letters of recommendation . And, increasingly seldom as I get older, the sweet girl who quietly enters my office, rues her poor performance in the course, and asks if there isn’t something she can do to pass. Be all this as it may, the interface between school and no school is still a stark one, and always hard to adjust to. Are these annual endings little glimpses of what retirement holds? When I finally stop teaching for good, will I wake up the next morning and pace the floor? Will I get out of bed at all? Will there be someone chastising me, “For heaven’s sake, find something to do with yourself! You’re driving me crazy!” I don’t know. 204 p Beginnings But for now, I do have a comforting ritual that helps me to, as they say, “decompress.” I turn my back on my cluttered desk, go home, change, and walk down to the banks of the Penobscot River, which courses behind my home. I take a moment to reflect on something Thoreau said, that when you build a house, build it on the water so that there’s one side from which people can’t get at you. With this in mind, I push off in my canoe and let the current take me, making only subtle, tentative insertions of my paddle to keep the bow pointed in the right direction. Now school is truly at my back. The scene before me is so lovely—thickly forested banks, a riverine island, cormorants on the wing—and the silence so absolute that it allows a dirty little secret to bubble to the surface of my thoughts: at year’s end, I don’t miss school. For eight months my students and I have transited lecture and laboratory and field trip together. I told them stories and they laughed. Some came to my office and cried. I have guided them one-on-one and given what I hoped was good advice. I have met the children of some of the older ones, the parents of some of the younger ones. It sounds like one big, happy family. But all of us know this isn’t so, because no sooner does the semester end than they are gone and I am ensconced , alone, in my office. Perhaps the academy is, as we are increasingly told by administrative sages, a business. And so, as with any business, there are times when the doors simply close and everybody goes home. As the semester wound down and my obligations slackened, I began to reacquaint myself with friends I hadn’t hobnobbed with in months. They asked me how I was doing. My invariable response: tired. I am always ashamed to say this because, after more than twenty years of teaching, I feel that I should have the process well in hand and that I should know enough to make things easy on myself so that I am not tired. I am starting to accept that if I have not learned by now how to get my job done without breaking a sweat, I am not...