"You always feel this way at the end of the summer," Dan reminded me. "As soon as you see your kids, you'll forget all about the summer."
I held on to that promise throughout the final months, hoping for an attitude change by the beginning of August.
Earlier in the summer, I had vaguely glimpsed Dan's prediction during my Orff certification course. I was telling a story about one of my soon-to-be fifth graders. I paused midway through and said with a sigh, "I miss my kids."
Several of the experienced music teachers in the room nodded their heads in empathy. A couple of the undergrads, who hadn't started their teaching careers, looked at me like I was a weird science experiment.
"Did I just hear you say that?" one of the college students said.
"Yeah," I mused, also surprised.
But I finished my class and quickly regressed into my Maybe I Should Quit Teaching to Become a Writer/Opera Singer/Broadway Star/Gardener/European Traveler/Professional Reader/Do-Nothing-For-A-Living Mentality.
By the second week of August, my school recorders, disassembled and recently retrieved from the dishwasher, sat drying on the kitchen counter. Dan spent his Monday lunch hour, carrying heavy boxes and moving risers around in my classroom. That week, students began to creep around the school like zombies trying to get into a building containing the last living humans.
One student, whose mother was volunteering in the school office, showed up at my door, asking if she could "help."
"She begged to come with me," the mother told me later. "I told her, 'If the teachers don't want you around, you need to leave them alone.' "
The little girl started "helping" in one primary classroom - "When Mrs. S is busy, she sends me to Miss H's room."
Somehow, the little girl ended up in my room. I put her to work recycling old files for me.
"Well," she said after we had thoroughly filled up my recycle bin, "I'd better get back to Miss H's room."
At that moment, I started to experience a twinge of Glad-to-See-My-Kids Syndrome, but it soon disappeared that evening when I started looking through my European vacation pictures on my home computer.
The following week, a couple of sisters stopped by my classroom and asked if they could help me get ready for the school's Sneak Peek.
They spent the afternoon compiling listening journals and telling me blonde jokes - "How does a blonde try to kill a fish? She drowns it."
After their plethora of blonde jokes had been exhausted, I said to the seventh grade sister with genuine nostalgia, "I can't believe you're going to be in junior high this year. And you," I turned to her sixth grade sister, "are leaving me next year. What am I going to do without either of you to entertain me?"
"I'll be here to pick her up after school," the seventh grade sister said.
"Like your oldest sister did last year?" Their oldest sister, now in high school, was also one of my former kids.
They informed me that their oldest sister was too busy watching T.V. to pick them up at school anymore.
Then the sixth grade sister paused and asked me, "Do you still type up all the funny things we say on your computer?"
At the Sneak Peek, several of last year's sixth graders - now seventh graders and no longer my "kiddos" - stopped by and talked about their excitement and apprehension about the next day, the first day of junior high.
Their biggest fear? Being able to open their lockers.
By the end of the evening, I was no longer mourning the end of my summer. Instead, I was mourning the loss of my former students. And I found myself equally delighted to see my new and returning students. I was officially ready for the school year to begin.
Check out my writing in An Eclectic Collage Volume 2: Relationships of Life, available September 15, 2011 from www.freundshippress.com. For more information, visit the book's Facebook page.
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