Getting off the swing
Just to gaze upon its placid surface, this is relaxing summer. Without work or any significant responsibilities, my days are filled with luxury problems like trying to be in bed by one so I don’t sleep past nine or having to decide if I should read and doze in bed, on the couch, or in the chaise lounge out by the pool. Given the chance, anyone can fill up his time with little walks, leisurely reading, cups of coffee in pajamas, and afternoons of sunning and swimming which become cookouts.
My intention here is not complain. After all, summer is perhaps the one real privilege society is still willing to grant to teachers, and like all teachers, I’m enjoying it. Nearly ten months of our year is spent defending ourselves against administrators with clipboards, and parents who don’t see why they should be responsible for their own children, and colleagues who steal staplers and markers, and that daily look of surprise, mild disgust but mostly surprise, from students when you ask them to produce a pencil at the beginning of class. As a teacher, it’s forgivable and even necessary to squander July and August.
The question, though, is whether or not it is forgivable, or necessary, if one is not returning to a world of close supervision, apathy, deceit, and boredom. The truth is that I can’t imagine not returning to IS 162. I know that I won’t be, but I don’t really believe it. Whatever it is that happens inside you when you stop believing one thing and start believing something else, it hasn’t happened yet.
It takes a few years of teaching before you are really able to believe that any lesson you plan will come off more or less the way you planned it, and that, even in darkest March, the school year really will end and there will be summer and then another. Like all cycles, the cycles of teaching have to repeat themselves a few times before they become recognizable as such. Like all cycles, they come to seem normal, organic, and permanent. On a swing, after a little work pumping with your legs to get off the ground, it takes much less effort and you feel like you could swing, back and forth, up and down, forever.
I suppose I’ve stumbled upon a cliche. Forgive me. That image is certainly what is meant by “getting into the swing of things,” but it’s a good image, even if I didn’t think of it.
Here’s where that image breaks down, at least for my purposes. That feeling that you could swing for hours, days, possibly the rest of your life, is really quite fleeting. After a while, your legs stop pumping and you get closer and closer to the ground, maybe even dragging your feet through the gravel to stop yourself faster. When the swing stops, you stand up and walk away. In the literal sense, that is how you get “out of the swing.” But when you decide, for whatever reason, that you aren’t going to teach forever, you have to walk away when the swing is at its highest point: that moment when the last bell on the last day rings and it’s summer vacation. In swinging terms, that means you have to work your legs and get as high as you can go, then jump.
I jumped. And in the meantime, I’m not complaining about the weightlessness, or the blue sky, or the warmth of the air. I’m just a little nervous about landing.