So, here we are

This morning I watched a group of 31 ninth graders graduate from the place where I work.

(photo by @JPorterNCCS)

I've always loved graduations. I've loved the music, the list of student names, the speeches, the hopefulness of it. I don't know what it is about the ceremonies, but I just love them. I think about one of my favorite movies, Harold and Maude, in which the two title characters connect as a result of their shared love of funerals. I love graduations. I would attend graduations all the time if I could. I would be a graduation crasher. 

When my wife and I first began dating I was the one who insisted we drive all the way to Syracuse, NY to attend her brother's graduation from college. 

I spoke at my graduation as an 8th grader, and then again at my high school graduation. I wasn't nearly as good as any of the three speakers I heard today, though. No, the 8th grader I watched yesterday, and the two 9th graders who spoke today were simply stunning and had me in tears. 

They spoke about loving each other, and about the unfathomable size of their experience at the school. They made me laugh, and they made me cry. 

That's were so reflective and they were so beautiful as they searched for words to make sense of this moment on the brink.

I love teaching at a school with four divisions. I love that our school has four moments of arrival and departure. I love that even when my former students come back to visit (like many did today), it is a moment of homecoming, a moment of joyful reuniting.

I wish we did this every year. 

In our lives, I mean. 

I think we can learn from graduations.

What if birthdays, or new year's day was a day of delivering reflections about the past year, about making toasts to what we've accomplished, about the things we've learned, the spaces in which we've dwelled, and the people who have had an impact on us. 

What if we celebrated our lives, and the education that takes place each day as we navigate the penumbral nature of our staying and leaving, coming and going, and the nearness and farness of it all...what if every year had a graduation and a moment of embracing to recognize,

Look at what you've done.

It wasn't perfect. But we did it.

And here we are.

We all could not be more proud.

I love graduations because they are celebrations of life and learning, two things that--if we've done our jobs right as teachers--are now synonymous in the hearts of our former students.

School's End as an Estuary

My students are immersed in the midst of exam week right now.

They're prepared.

They're confident.

They're anxious.

This predictably crazy thing happens at the end of the year where everyone gets a little restless. We (and I include myself in this) are not restless because we want summer to arrive more quickly,  though the smells of spring definitely awaken our sleepy senses after months of cold. No, instead, we're restless because we're ready. Ready for the next big thing in our lives. This is a time of year I've referred to on this blog as binding off. But this year I have a new metaphor for the end of school.

This is the estuary.

Estuaries are the places where rivers flow into larger bodies of water, usually the ocean. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), 

"Estuaries are among the most productive ecosystems in the world. Many animals rely on estuaries for food, places to breed, and migration stopovers. [But] estuaries are delicate ecosystems."

In a school, I liken the end of the school year to an estuary (can I jargonize* the term and call it an estuaric moment? I think it's actually estuarine) because the end of the year is so productive....it is a moment of such transformation and change. Rivers don't suddenly become oceans, and 8th graders don't suddenly become 9th graders...it has happened gradually, the brackish salt mixing in with the fresh water flow, the pull of the tide, coaxing the river onward and into itself. But it's not just a one dimensional transformation either. Instead, it's a place to breed new ideas, and ways of thinking; it is a stopover on the migratory process of one's education...one's life. The end of the year is a time of saying thank you and goodbye and I have loved sharing a classroom with you...we rely on these times of year not just to hurry up and end the year, but to pause and acknowledge all we've shared, and to reflect.

They're delicate, too.

My own son is just finishing up Kindergarten and he recently had his "portfolio day." This was his opportunity to share his progress and process of being a person who had just spent a year in Kindergarten, with the grown ups in his life. He displayed such amazing poise in his moment...he understood where he had been and how much he had changed.

Every student in his class was ensconced in some area of the classroom, and as I looked around, I knew that every child had evolved, every child's self-portraits were vastly different from the ones they created in the fall, and every child was at a beautifully exciting moment in their process of learning to read. Was everyone in the exact same moment of their own proximal development? 

Of course not.

But that's not the way estuaries work, either. There are meandering flows, and eddies that swirl around, unwilling to voyage out to the sea...there are species that take months to hatch, while others take hours. The ecosystem of an estuary is beautiful, and so is June in the life of a school. I imagine the river banks that never grow tired of seeing a new season of hatchlings, of spawning, of seasons changing and transforming.

We teachers are no different. I like to think we get wiser while our students stay the same age from year to year. This year, as I mentioned before, I challenged myself to write an exam review packet that my students would never throw away. The result was this book and I gave it to my students yesterday.

On the last page, I put the following:

I know that, once it leaves the estuary, fresh water can't go back to its place of origin, back to its source. But each molecule of water has become part of something far more vast and beautiful. It has become something worth acknowledging, something to appreciate. It has become bigger than it could have been alone. Luckily for our time on this earth, we can go back. My reflection to my students begins with my own acknowledgment of where I've been, and all those estuary moments from which I was born again.

*My friend Nate used to use made up words in conversation. If nobody called him on it (because they thought he had used a real word), he said they had been jargonized. I have never forgotten this word and share the story with my eighth graders each year when we discuss etymology and how all words have a moment of origin.