A Reason for Each Season

By Cindy Reitzi

September 2003

Some years back, I saw a commercial advertising a “back-to-school” sale. A woman calls to a male voice under bed covers, “Get up! It’s time to go to school.”
“But I don’t wanna…” protests the whiny voice under the covers. This exchange repeats itself a couple of times until the woman delivers the punch line, “You have to go to school. You’re the principal.”

Even the most dedicated educators have felt this way in August, when back-to-school ads remind us it’s “that time of year” again. Some people just need to gear up for the start of school. They need to start the mental neurons firing again or go get back-to-school supplies to get back to reality. For me, it’s like a long period of inactivity, then gearing up to exercise seriously. It’s a little like learning to swim again. The relaxed part of me rebels against shifting into high gear again. Last June, I went from constant motion, planning, and grading to a total standstill collapse. (I usually need a day or two of long stretches of sleep after an active school year). Now we return to another season in transition: summer mode to school mode. “Summer mode” is large, luxurious blocks of unscheduled time to travel and pursue projects – and reading left on the back burner of the school year. Even for the many of us who spend the summer earning credits, volunteering our time, or working to earn a few extra bucks, the pace and the stress level is reduced. “School mode” is every minute, hour, lesson, unit, and grading period planned out with calibrated bells to punctuate time and mark the movement of people. Time counts are 50 precious minutes of substantive activities. And yet, with these structural limitations, teachers still manage to encourage creativity and learning in the classroom.

The other creaky part of this transition is the unknown factor. We usually don’t know which students we are getting and whither the mix will be. Will we have the right chemistry: just enough spontaneous talkers and pensive thinkers to make it interesting, or will we get a roomful of near-dead, silent creatures waiting for everyone else to speak? This can provoke the do-I-remember-how-to-do-this-job doubts.

Nonetheless, you start to plan. And along with planning come the Ghosts (some friendly and some demons) of School Past, replaying flashes of past mistakes and dreaded situations you hope never to replicate, but also recalling passionate classes, with the types of energy and lessons you long to repeat.

Lately, my nightmares flash back to a first-hour class of silent death masks whose reaction time was 20 minutes tops. It was populated with some second-semester senior-types I hope never to encounter again. It’s not just that they slacked off second semester, missed deadlines, got zeroes in record percentages, practiced ‘selective hearing’ on instructions, and made me fill out too many of those “seniors in danger of failure” forms for guidance. That would have been bad enough if they had taken responsibility for their own actions. Instead, some blamed me because they didn’t take responsibility for their own actions and then engaged me in surreal conversations (like questioning why I wouldn’t excuse a deadline missed over an unexcused “Senior Skip Day”; or why, according to one girl, I allegedly told only her not to complete an assignment that everybody else had to do). I did learn that I needed to change my approach to deadlines. Sometimes irritation is the mother of conventions.

On the other hand, I have sharp, pleasant memories of student lessons, like aromas of favorite food, that I hope to experience again. Last semester, students created posters that represented themes in the books they were reading. They then presented their posters in oral presentations. Several students showed me the impact of visualizing ideas in a piece of literature, both as symbol and analysis. One artistic student represented the themes of black women’s oppression, religion and nature in “The Color Purple” by Alice Walker, by fashioning symbols for each. I was impressed by how the poster’s symbols and her explanation of them expressed crucial themes in the book. It was powerful visual shorthand. I realized I wanted to do more with visual learning with my students. So I have this to look forward to.

Summer conventions like sun, vacation, humidity and mosquitoes come to an end and give way to crisp breezes, aromatic harvests, and color palettes of leaves making the transition from trees to fall carpets. Every season has its purpose. Still, once the first day of school arrives, there’s no more time to test the waters. You dive off the deep end, touch the bottom to check for depth, and then surge upward, breaking to the surface, sputtering a bit. The water is a cold but expected shock, but as your muscles start to work, they regain the memory of something called swimming and propel you through the water. It gets easier, and it refreshes. And after that first plunge, you remember how to swim again.

Posted September 10, 2003