Feeling It

I check once. And again. And one more time. This can’t be right. But it is. I’ve been retired for a decade. From full-time teaching, that is.

Why is it, then, that this particular year, I wake in the morning thinking I have only a few more days of summer, that I need to set up my classroom and check class rosters and move my waking time earlier each day so that 4:30 A.M. won’t feel like such a shock? Why does my gut tighten with back-to-school anxiety?

My first fall off, I expected this. Although school was a mile away, it was like I could hear the opening bell. I knew when first period ended and that three minutes later second period started. I could count the periods through to the end of the day.

The following fall, I felt it again, but not so strongly. And each year, the school bell sounded more faintly. And less often.

I still follow school closings on snowy mornings and send silent sympathies to teachers on the sugar-loaded day after trick-or-treating and wonder about the absentee rate the Monday after the Super Bowl and follow federal, state, and local education news.

But falls no longer feel like someone forgot to ring the bell.

Until this year.

Why?

On a hammock one afternoon, it comes to me. It’s my grandkids. Four of them, the ones who turned tassels, tossed hats, and dwarfed me in family pictures last spring, are all headed to college. Two other grandkids are entering tough high school programs. Another is enrolled in a new school. The youngest of them all is now in middle school. And how well I know those wrought-filled years.

All of these young people, who once toddled around our house and rode scooters in our driveway and flopped on the floor to watch a train circle under our Christmas tree—all of them are heading to perhaps the most uncertain and thrilling parts of their lives so far.

They’ve got to be feeling it.

And so am I.

Emotional contagion is what we call this in education—mirror neurons in the brain that take on the experiences of another.

In retirement, it’s called a sappy grandma.

Maybe sappy and seventy and retired for a decade. And maybe a hammock. But I’ve still got three decades of teaching inside me.