"Got a lead foot down on my accelerator and the rear view mirror torn off"
Who can name that tune?? Also, happy last day of school!!!!!
A place to explore: Anywhere you can get to as soon as that final bell rings
I don’t remember much of my first year of teaching (thank God - I’m sure it was horrible), but I do remember the last day of school and the utter relief of turning in those final grades and being free.
For the first time in ten months, my shoulders dropped away from my ears and I took my first anxiety-free inhale.
I’d never felt such exhilaration.
Imagine the feel of an open road, your favorite song on the radio, the thrill of leaving a terrible boyfriend, the first glimpse of the ocean, and the successful conclusion of childbirth, all in one feeling. That’ll get you close to how a first-year teacher feels on the last day of school.
Yes. A school year ending brings more relief than labor ending.
Although both of my births were epidural-laden affairs, so take that statement with a syringe of salt.
I’ve had seventeen last-day-of school moments since that first one, and while they’ve all had their sense of relief and freedom,1 nothing has come close to that first year. Like an addict, I’m always chasing the last-day-of-school high I experienced that first year.
The second-best way to manufacture the feeling is to leave for vacation directly after checking out of school. I managed this a few years ago. The car was packed and we were heading west (no small feat when you live in Seattle - ferries were involved) before dinnertime.
The best was to recapture the feeling is to move. Quitting your job and permanently leaving the state on the last day of school will give you a pretty good high as well.
I’ve done this twice.
The first time was in Las Vegas. After five years and one failed marriage in Sin City, I ended my lease and moved out of my apartment on June 1st…although the last day of school was later in the week. I spent a few days living at The Golden Nugget (Vegas hotels were super cheap on weekdays) until school ended, hoping nobody would break into my Honda Civic and steal all my earthly possessions.2
It’s really weird to walk through the casino floor at 6am, dressed in teacher clothes, heading off to work.
A few years later, I moved out of my little basement apartment in Golden, Colorado on my last day teaching for Denver Public Schools. I had a little baby in tow for that adventure, so I’d packed up everything in one of those moving cubes a few days earlier, in between prepping for final exams and sending “this is your kid’s final chance” emails to parents.
After that last day of school I picked up Aubrey from her sitter (the grandmother of one of my students!) and we headed for the mountains.
Our final destination was Seattle, but we spent a week in the Bay Area first so we could visit family and I could run the San Francisco Half Marathon. Travel is delightfully slow with a baby, so after leaving Denver we stayed in Steamboat Springs, camped in the Wasatch Mountains, holed up in Elko, and took advantage of cheap rooms in Reno before arriving in San Jose. I’m still mad at myself for not stopping in Tahoe. I’ve still never swam in those crystal clear waters.
My thrilling last-day-of-school days are on a bit of a pause for the time being. I have no plans to leave Washington state in a blaze of glory (all my stuff would no longer fit in a Honda Civic or a single packing cube anyway), and my kids like to have a couple lazy days before heading off on vacation. For my upcoming last-day-of-school, I’m going to pull into the staff parking lot with my paddle board already atop of my car, so I can tear out of school and head directly to a new lake3 after turning in final grades.
If you don’t vibe with any of this, and you’d rather collapse in an exhausted heap until you recover, no worries. Adam from The Paste Easters has you covered:
An end-of-school-year checklist
I know this is too late for some of you, who closed up your classroom sometime around Memorial Day, but for all you teachers who will be setting that alarm through mid-June, here ya go:
Print off all your current class rosters and leave them on your desk. The day before students return to school for the 2024-2025 school year, read down the lists of names and picture each student in your head. When they come back to say hi to you on the first day of school, their names will be fresh in your brain.
On the last day of school, have students write all their social media handles on your white board so they can follow each other and so you can keep in contact with your graduating seniors. Keeping tabs on your former students as they begin careers and families is one of the great joys of teaching.
Get your hands on supplies for next year. See if your department has money that needs to be spent by the end of the schoolyear, grab supplies from teachers who are retiring/leaving, and take advantage of any time that supply closet in the main office is accidently left open. The less stuff you have to buy in August, the better.
Print copies for next year…but don’t go overboard here. You don’t want to print off 100 copies of your 5-page World History syllabus only to find on in July that you’ll be teaching American History next year (oh, the horror!), but if there are papers you KNOW you’ll need, print them off now and avoid the copy rush next fall.
Sign up for summer professional development. If you have your eye on National Board Certification (or renewal) next year, you’ll
wantneed to get a head start this summer. Check out their website for webinars and support classes. If you don’t have to worry about certification or renewal, lucky you! Find some fun professional development opportunities. For my fellow Washington State gov teachers, this one in Olympia looks good. I have to miss it this year because it’s the week of my friend’s wedding but hopefully I can make it next year.Make a summer bucket list! If you’ve got little ones, check out Michele’s ideas:
A book to read: WE DIDN’T ASK FOR THIS by Adi Alsaid
This is a bit of a strange recommendation, as it’s not historical. WE DIDN’T ASK FOR THIS is a contemporary YA (young adult) novel published in 2020. However, the book was in my head as I began writing this newsletter because I THOUGHT it took place at the end of a school year. The story is of a high school’s annual lock-in, wherein the students were free to roam their school all night, participating in trapeze courses, a sanctioned food fight, and the not-sanctioned secret party.
“People fell in love on lock-in night. They stumbled upon new passions that would shape the rest of their lives, discovered friendships they could not imagine living without, before of after. Traumas were resolved on lock-in night, anxieties disappeared, never to return, not even after the buses arrived in the morning to take the students back home.”
Doesn’t this seem like an end-of-the-school-year vibe?
But no. I’d remembered wrong. When I went back to re-read the book, I realized it takes place in April. Therefore, it is NOT a good match for my end-of-the-year newsletter, but I can’t get the book out of my head so I’ll tell you about it anyway.
It’s amazing.
As this lock-in begins, just before readers meet all the delightful characters they’ll be spending the next 350 pages with, Marisa chains herself to the main entrance of the school. Her posse members also chain themselves to every school exit. They settle down next to their pee buckets and swallow the keys to their padlocks.
They are protesting climate change. Until the school and it’s community members (note: this is an international school. Most of the student’s parent were quite wealthy and influential) commit to a series of demands meant to rescue coral reefs from the brink of extinction, no one would be walking in or out of the school doors.
Of course this wrecks all kinds of plans for the night. The secret booze and the DJ equipment are stuck outside. Time and energy allocated for improv sessions and laser tag now must be spent finding a blowtorch and/or creating a new exit out of the building.
The novel deftly hops from kid to kid to kid, weaving together backstories and making clever connections to both the lock-in and the bigger concepts of protest, climate change, and privilege. A time stamp to begin each chapter lends a page-turning urgency to the read.
4It’s a brilliant, brilliant book. A perfect read on the last day of school, where you can stay up all night reading because you don’t have to go teach the next day. Or a perfect read if you are taxiing down a runaway or waiting in a ferry line, heading off on that first summer vacation.
Happy summer break teachers. We deserve it!
Except 2020
They didn’t! My earthly possessions made it safely from Las Vegas to Tucson, to California, and then to Seattle.
Jo Dee Messina, Bye Bye (1998)
My first year was right at the height of the pandemic after the return to in person learning. That summer was so wonderful.
Happy last day of school!!!