Last Friday I met with my school’s headmaster to talk curriculum. In all honesty, I had done no work on curriculum since the end of the school year, because the day after school ended, I was on a plane to Kenya. I didn’t pack any textbooks.
It took Some Doing to bring my mind back into humanities lines. I pulled out the curriculum I’d taught last year and the one I’m writing to teach next year. I looked through some books, reviewed some lesson plans and, sure enough, it began coming back to me. I enjoyed meeting with the headmaster that day: as is usually the case with me, talking curriculum is Very Nearly As Good as going out to lunch.
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Afterward, I decided to take another look at our new building. I had been in it once toward the very end of the school year, when the walls were newly up but not the ceilings or the paint. I walked through the downstairs and the upstairs, remembering what I’d been told about what would go where: here are the science labs and this is the library, here is the nurse’s station and this– this here– My Classroom. I stood there for a minute and Just Looked.
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Tonight Emma and I went to see a play. This production of You Can’t Take It With You was the result of a single week of drama camp: high school students working like the dickens to learn and block and perfect the Entire Play in one week. My friend Brenda was one of the directors, and my student Maria, who had played Portia in our school production of The Merchant of Venice, was the ingenue.
The play was excellent. We laughed a lot and really enjoyed ourselves.
And it was great to see Maria in this role. She did a very good job, and brought back all kinds of memories from our performance in May.
After the play, she told me that, often throughout the week, she was reminded of our work on Merchant. “I talked about it all the time,” she told me. “The other cast members were getting sick of it.”
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Then Emma Grace and I went over to Barnes & Noble in the hopes of finding Bill, William and Everett at the Harry Potter party. As soon as we saw them, Bill told me that Jocelyn and Hadley were “right over there.”
I looked, and he was right: two more of my students from last year, hanging out and waiting for the release of Rowling’s last book. They spotted me as soon as I spotted them, and then there we were, all hugs and smiles and catching up. We talked about Kenya and Hawaii and boys and the new building and who would be staying up all night reading Harry Potter.
It was So Good to see them.
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Today is July 20, which means that, in exactly One Month, I’ll be back at the school for teacher work days. And the students will arrive one week and three days after that: August 29th.
I wouldn’t have believed it in May, or even a few weeks ago, but I think I’m really looking forward to this.
