No. Nothing.
Not your lesson plan, not your attitude, not your ability to perceive the perceptions of your students.
Not your curriculum, not your textbook, not the selection of literature you so carefully selected last June.
Not your understanding of what exactly is happening at the back of the classroom when everyone should be listening to You and not fooling around with what is obviously and simultaneously invisibly distracting them.
Not your judgment of attitudes or dress code violations or behavior.
Not your personal experience or even information that might help you grasp what a student is going through or just went through the night before so that you are able to be helpful or even have an inkling of what might be the right thing to say.
Not your students, not their attitudes, not their assiduous learning of their lines.
Not the schedule that affords rehearsals only during class time.
Not the strapless, sleeveless dresses that are Not Even Remotely Renaissance-style dresses, but they are all you have.
Not the set– which breaks, or the props– which disappear.
Not the folder in which you have been keeping the copy of your script and a few additional props that suddenly goes missing two hours before the play opens and is Never Found.
Not the single dress rehearsal–that is far too few (in terms of dress rehearsals)– that went very badly and couldn’t exactly even be called a dress rehearsal because you never even went through the entire play beginning to end and so really have no idea how long the entire thing will go or even if, in fact, you can do the entire thing.
Not the performance itself, which goes off (surprisingly) without a hitch despite Entire Sections of Lines dropped from the fourth and most important act– dropped and picked up again in so reckless and unreasonable a fashion that you sitting in the front row with (new) script and book in hand ready to provide them with lines when exactly this kind of thing happens have No Earthly Idea where in the world they might be, but then they find themselves again and the whole thing works just fine, leaving you sitting there, open book in lap, dumbfounded and Quite Pleased.
No, nothing’s perfect.
But maybe They are, those students of yours, who have pulled this off and who are standing on the stage in front of you. Yes, these students might be perfect, for now anyway, when they have held an audience riveted and silent for nearly two hours; who have interpreted Shakespeare with their minds and brought his ideas to life with their mouths and bodies; who, for this most important of nights, spoke loudly enough and slowly enough and Made Themselves Heard; who developed stage comfort and presence that astounds you; who got those lines (mostly) down, even if it was at the Very Last Minute; who demonstrated comic timing and interpretation that made you and the audience laugh So Hard; who showed that highly entertained audience that Shakespeare is outrageously funny and gut-wrenchingly sad and that prejudice and unkindness and revenge and mercy are as least as old as the Renaissance, and maybe older.
Yes, maybe they are perfect, those twenty students of yours, who have taken their bows and are standing there on the stage being appropriately applauded. And it’s their perfection, really, that makes you smile So Hard. The smiling makes your face hurt, and you spend the next day (when you are not sleeping) just thinking and thinking and thinking of them and the play and feeling simultaneously Overjoyed and Grateful and So Proud because you– for this year, at this time– got to be their teacher.
Yes, maybe they are perfect. Or maybe you just love them.
I think that’s it. But really, what else do you need?
