Back to School
For whom is summer’s end most traumatic? For students? Their parents? Or their teachers?
My wife Deedie woke me at dawn with a cup of strong coffee. “He’s leaving,” she said. I knew what that meant.
I got up, drank the coffee, looked at the walls of our bedroom. Light reflecting off of the lake was shimmering there. I put in my hearing aids. From downstairs I caught the end of a conversation. “So you’ve got everything,” said Deedie.
I put my feet on the floor. I was still a little confused from the dream I’d been having, something about the families that numbers belong to, and how those families overlap: whole numbers, rational numbers, imaginary numbers.
“Can I take these whoopee pies?” asked our son.
Of course he could take the whoopee pies. I went downstairs to find Sean going through his final checklist: his retainer, his phone, a credit card. “I’m so proud of you,” I said. “I’m going to miss you.”
“I’m going to miss you too,” he said, and we hugged, and then he was gone. Deedie and I stood by the front door and watched him drive away. Our Labrador retrievers watched too, wagging uncertainly. They are so old now I can hardly believe they are still alive. We got them when our sons were tiny children.
Now Sean is an engineering student at the University of Rochester. I can tell you the names of the courses he’s taking, but not much else: Fluid Dynamics, Finite Element Analysis, Material Science, Mechanics II. He’s a T.A. in Boundary Value Problems, too. Just as in that world of dreams I’d conjured, my son has joined a family of numbers.
Deedie headed off with the dogs for a walk, and I went down to the dock with my coffee and watched the sunrise. The sun was so bright I could hardly bear to look at the sky. Words from a Dylan song came to me: “I’ve got my back to the sun because the light is too intense. I can see what everybody in the world is up against.”
It wasn’t our first first day of school; after twenty-two years as parents we’ve become old hands at this ritual by now: the sorrow and the pride. But for me, a teacher married to a teacher, I wondered once again for whom the first day is school is most traumatic: for students? For their parents? Or the teachers?
I came to teaching relatively late in life, and I was nearly 30 before I first faced a room full of students. I was so frightened that first day at Colby College, back in 1988: Would my students like me? What if they found out I was a total fraud? I rehearsed my opening lecture again and again before classes began, a lecture that wasn’t much more than, “Here is the syllabus.”
By time I faced the students, of course, I was over-prepared, and the hour passed by in seconds. It took me another month to loosen up, and longer than that to learn the lesson that in retrospect should have been obvious from the beginning — that having a sense of humor, which had been such an obstacle for me as a student, turned out to be an asset for a teacher. It was with a sense of wonder that I realized — somewhere in October — that I was a good teacher, that I’d finally found, after nearly ten years in the workforce, a job I had a talent for. It was almost — but not quite — enough for me to forget the weeks and weeks of sheer terror that had afflicted me in August.
That fear was the direct descendant of the uncertainty I’d felt on the first days of school, stretching back to childhood. When I was twelve, I’d started a new school, far enough away from our home that my father had to drive me there each day. An early riser, my father saw nothing unusual about dropping me off at school at 6:30 AM, on his way to work, hours and hours before the first bell rang.
On the first day of seventh grade, I’d arrived at the middle school building to find the place dark, although the front door was open. I crept inside, turning the lights on in the auditorium, in the lunch room, in my classroom. I went down a flight of empty, echoing stairs and found the locker room, and my locker. I couldn’t find the lights there, so it was dark.
Then I heard a groan, and the sound of a broom against the floor. I peeked around the corner of a row of lockers. There I saw an elderly man, mopping the floor. His face was deformed with warts and neurofibrotomas, something like the elephant man. He looked up at me with round, sorrowful eyes.
I bit my tongue to keep from screaming. Then I rushed out of that dark room and ran back upstairs. Not knowing what else to do, I sat down in my homeroom in the desk marked with my name, and felt my heart pound for an hour, until the teacher poked his head in the door. He was surprised to see me.
As I sat by the lake drinking my coffee, I thought about that man with the warts again. It had not occurred to me, back then, that the stranger might have been as afraid of me as I was of him, as afraid as I was, years and years later, of my students at Colby.
On the day we sent our older son off to Kindergarten for the first time, my wife and I had had two very different reactions as the school bus pulled away, the boy waving happily to us from the window. I had burst into tears, while Deedie just grinned in triumph. “But — we’re losing him to the world!” I cried, melodramatically. “I know,” she replied, with an air of immense satisfaction.
I think even on that first day of Kindergarten I was already imagining our older son, now a college graduate, heading out into the world, and leaving us behind. But then, we raise our children to leave us, to head out at dawn so that they may join other families — families of numbers, families of ideas, families of strangers. Maybe the whole point of having children in the first place is so you can wind up with your heart broken, again and again, until nothing can bring you solace, except tears.
Whoopee pies can help a little too, maybe.
My wife returned from her walk with the dogs, and I headed back up to join her. As I walked toward home the words of that Dylan song returned to me once more: “You can’t turn back, you can’t come back. Sometimes we push too far. One day you’ll open up your eyes and you’ll see where we are.”
