Last day at Angell

Today was my last day at Angell Job Corps. I was too nervous to sleep much the night before, so by morning, I was pretty much a train wreck of nerves, and unbelievably tired after a whole week of poor sleep, but I got out of bed and made it to work somehow.

This morning was the student/staff breakfast (a quarterly event where the staff serves the students breakfast), but I had so much to do still, that I didn't have time to really go. I just made a brief guest appearance (I was too stressed out to eat anyway), so I went and took pictures (and took advantage of the fact that everyone was there to say goodbye to) then I went back to packing until the students showed up.

The last two days, I devoted to watching movies in class. I really needed the time to do things like data entry and grading and going through my files and such, and since school was actually still in session for another week, I had to do all of it with kids in the room. Movies were the obvious solution to the problem. I had my students bring movies and as long as they were appropriate, we'd watch them in class. It worked beautifully and kept everyone out of my hair enough to get my work (mostly) done. (I strongly recommend watching movies in class at the end of the year, it makes the behavior so much more bearable.)

After the end of the school day, I had a couple of kids stay and help me pack and clean the room up a bit (after a week of normal use). *R* elected to stay awhile longer and wanted to draw me "one last picture". I let him, understanding that in his own quiet way he just wanted to say goodbye in that fashion. Since I'm not good at goodbyes anyway, that made sense to me.

Before I left, I walked around the campus, catching whoever I could before I got into the truck and drove off. One of the last kids I saw was one of the very first kids I met when I started working at Angell--he was sitting in the office of Admin. Most kids come and go within 9 months to a year, but for whatever reason, he is still here a year and a half later, working on whatever it is that he's working on. It seemed highly appropriate that he would be one of the last people I would see as I left.

The weather was completely lousy, and it was raining pretty hard. I drove past the smoking gazebo and waved goodbye, past the dining hall (that was dark, being empty of students), and admin (where everyone had gone home an hour ago), and past the education building where I worked for a year and a half. I drove past those iconic wind turbines that Cedar has always found so fascinating, and looped out of the drive and pulled out on the highway, flying past Tillicum Beach, where I had spent so much time walking on the beach during my lunch breaks looking for huge pieces of Jasper, and tsunami debris from Japan.

I drove home feeling that way all teachers probably feel after finishing another school year, a small part relief, but mostly tired, nostalgic, and a little teary.

It's still really hard to believe that this is real, and that I won't be sitting in my classroom next week doing exactly what I've always done...teaching Reading and Health (and Life Skills, Social Skills, and a little bit of everything else!) It's hard to believe that it was over so fast, and that so many people have come in and out of my life in the past year and a half.

As a teacher, you always wonder what kind of impact you have on your students. How does the time you spend together affect you both? What things will they remember about their time in class? What was important to them? What did they think was memorable? What did they get out of being there? I always ask them at the very end, and this year's responses were a little something like this: "I loved all the cool books there were to read in this class", "I really liked going for walks during health class", "I loved that we learned about so many different things", "This was my favorite class", etc.