The Last Day

Today my co-teacher Amie and I will pack-up Everything in our room, which would be difficult if you weren't the sort who just tipped drawers upside down into boxes. I don't have patience for sorting, which sometimes works to my disadvantage but mostly to my credit, I like to think. Amie has been slowly packing for weeks, preparing for the big move. All of our boxes will be distributed to our new rooms ready to be unpacked by us when school reopens this fall. But Amie won't be there. She is moving to a different school and I am moving to a new room at the same (although millions of dollars bigger and better) school. The white flight community where I work is one of the fastest-growing counties in the country. I will miss Amie's diabolical laugh next year. I'm feeling quite lonely and lost already. We have been a team for four years and I have learned a lot from watching the way she interacts with the special ed students that she oversees.

Yesterday my "ADD boys" finished their exam early, and knowing they couldn't handle the free time, I gave them a writing assignment. I told them it was their "time to beg for forgiveness" and explain what grade they thought they deserved. They were so truthful and cute in their little essays, confessing all of their transgressions ("I'm sorry I talked so much." "Please forgive me for sleeping that time." "We weren't so bad, were we Ms ____?") and hoping for the best. Many of them for years have slipped through the cracks, have chronic behavior problems and have come to expect the worst. Their lives are already permanently imprinted with "failure" at age 15. It pisses me off. But then I guess that is what we do. We group em we track em we spit out the ones destined for success and we spit out the ones destined to be the "have nots".

But I can't think about that right now, though I do like to beat my head against the wall. My latest head beating has been over the stupid Republicans and their stupid constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. Oh, and of course this:

As a result of human overpopulation, and capitalism’s inherent greed, virtually all of the world’s great ecosystems are in decline or collapse. The earth’s ability to replenish herself and to sustain her immense biological diversity (biological capital) is being diminished. So we are living in the midst of one of the planet’s great extinction episodes and it is human induced. Sacred Ecology and Capitalism, by Charles Sullivan

The tree is gone. Apparently the birds are carrying on without it. I suppose I will carry on without it too.