After the final bell: Teaching withdrawal

By JESSE SCACCIA

It has now been a week since I left my students in Cape Town. It is the mornings that I find myself missing that teacher’s life the most.

I miss the taste of Jungle Oats the cook, Momma D, would make us all for breakfest. I miss the way I had to flirt with the clutch before our van would start to drive the guys to school. I miss the way Unathi would say, “Hey man, could I get just a minute of your time,” when he needed help on his homework. Most of all, I miss that unquestionable, singular feeling of being truly useful.

But worse than what I’m missing is what I’m losing. Already I can’t quite recall the exact words of goodbye they said to me at the airport. I forget Derek’s handshake (they all had such unique greetings.) I search my sense memory, and I can’t find that particular smell of mildew from old, damp books that dominates the study room.

Like I’ve gone cold turkey from a drug, my students are vacating my body.

I have all the emotional symptoms that an addict would feel on withdrawal. I crave that useful feeling. I feel anxiety, wondering if I did enough; worrying if they’ll remember me; knowing that some of them won’t be okay in the end, and that now, there’s nothing I can do about it. I find myself fighting the onset of the black hand of depression.

There is something so natural, so cycle of life, to being a teacher. When you first meet your students they seem new to the world. No matter what age I’ve taught, from toddlers to adults at the community college, I’ve seen in them that same awkward innocence on the first day of school. They fidget. They question. They want to discover more, a better self. There are intricacies to their language you must learn, and they have to learn to understand you too. Everything about those first few weeks embodies the concept of Beginning.

As time goes on you become more familiar with each other. You watch your students learn, and as they learn they evolve as humans. The metamorphosis of learning is a miracle on par with any in nature, all us teachers know. Finally, by the end of the year, your students are changed, changed by their work, but also by your hand.

The power of helping someone learn can be intoxicating.

Then, on some random day on the calender, it all is taken away. And nothing is necessarily left in its place.

I’m not contracted to teach again until late August, a freshman writing class at the local college. The cycle will begin again, as it does every fall. But until then, I have to admit to you: I’m a little worried. Mornings just aren’t the same without knowing I’m getting up to teach.

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Readers: In the comments section, share your thoughts on dealing with the end of the semester. Do you sometimes find yourself a little depressed too? How do you fill the void? Do you keep in touch with students, or do you hide away for the summer? Do you miss standing in front of the blackboard, or the folding chair by the pool will suit you just fine (thank you very much)? As us teacher types like to say, Let’s share.