A Handful of Staples

Right now I'm sitting the quiet of my classroom, thinking about the last 10 years I've spent teaching 3rd graders. As another year draws to a close, it's time once again to clean the closets, take stock, and reflect.

I love the quiet, busy days of May.  My students know me so well they can practically teach themselves.  I know them so well that I can measure exact ratios of praise-to-discipline without a second thought.  Usually, May is when I refocus and re-energize, thinking about all I've done well and what I'd like to change.

This year is a little different for me however, because come August I will be in a new room teaching 1st graders.  Someone else is going to be in this room next year, teaching the children I might have had.  Someone else will be tacking her posters up on the walls in this classroom I now have to leave behind.

While I'm so excited to open that door and experience new things, I feel a little sad to leave this room...this small but sunny, happy room where I have become a teacher.  Everything that I am as an educator, I learned here in room 41.   

As I take my charts down off the walls and begin to pack, I gather staples from the wall.  I don't want to be "that" teacher who leaves her mess behind for another.  No, I carefully pull each staple out, readying my walls for the paint and ideas yet to come.

Each item I take down reminds me of my journey to this point.  With each staple I remove, I remember a certain lesson, or activity, or idea that came from my crazy imagination. Curiously, under some posters are older staples...relics of abandoned theories and pedagogies.  I see them and smile to myself as I gather them in my palm. 

Although my memories are full, the room begins to seem so empty.  The more I remove, the more it seems as if I'm removing myself from this space.  I look around and imagine that soon it will be as if I never existed here, and all I will have to show for these 10 years will be a handful of staples.

Can the measure of all that I am (and all that I have been) really be held in the palm of my hand?  I can't tell you how strong is the childish urge to write in a hidden-away spot, "Dawn was here."  Don't worry New Teacher, I'm going to resist it.

But in the future, if you should happen to visit me in my new sunny, happy classroom, you may come across a little jar full of used silver staples. And we'll just keep that between us.