This afternoon I was thinking how different the end of the school year is if you teach as an adult, than what I remember as a kid when I was a student.
This is the busiest and most tiring time for me: giving exams, grading them, totalling up grades, making sure I've done it right and remembered to do things, like, dropping the lowest lab grade like I promised the students I would.
But also, there's a lot of additional stuff, people needing things from me. Someone had to make up an hourly exam they had missed, they missed the first appointment and I gave them another (I am perhaps too generous but this is someone with accommodations for some mental health issues and I don't want to add to their anxiety, even if it makes *my* life harder). Another person who wanted to make up a lab quiz they missed (this is permitted) but they never showed up today and have not e-mailed me. And the person looking to redeem the I? Isn't going to do it. They said they had a transmissible illness and okay, fine, but I can't let them redeem it after this semester is over (those are the rules) and I am NOT in this case going and trying to talk an administrator into letting them; I tried that more than a decade ago with someone who demonstrably COULD NOT come back (extended cardiac rehab after having to have a congenital issue fixed on an emergency basis) and I darn near got my head ripped off (though the admin relented when I wrote a letter explaining and had my department chair sign it). This person is mostly just avoidant, and I recognize that as someone who tends to be avoidant, but I'm not at all sure it's my problem now when they had months they could have dealt with it, and in fact, they had two or three instances where they said they were coming in and then something "came up" at the last minute.
So yeah, I'm pretty worn out, and also trying to work on the research I hadn't had time to do. And I don't deal well at all with sudden schedule changes like that, where I stop doing things one way and do them a different way. I recognize that and yeah it's silly, but it also messes with my brain wiring to change on a dime how I do things.
Thinking back to K-12, though - well, I always think of the line from "Square Meals" that went something like "no matter how miserable it actually was, the farther you get from childhood, the better it looks" and yeah, I mainly remember the Big Countdown to the last day, and doing things like taking home art projects that had been up on display, or gathering up the textbooks to turn them back in (and removing the brown-paper-bag book covers I always made for them, it was recommended we did that, to keep the covers nice).
And cleaning out our lockers, and in the years we had gym clothes (Junior high, where it was daily, rather than once a week like in the lower grades) taking them home and *leaving them at home* (I hated the gym clothes; they never fit well and they were uncomfortable; the shorts were too short).
And of course there was the anticipation of summer - whole days to do what you wanted! Making plans to play with friends! Getting to watch cartoons all day (or, well, the part of the day they were on - we didn't have cable and there were only 2 channels that showed cartoons on weekdays). Running around outside. Not having to do homework. And for me: not having to deal with the kids who bullied me.
And some years there was day camp for a few weeks, which was fun, and there was the annual town-wide ice cream social, and some years we went berry-picking to make jam.
And the very last day of school - some years the school bus driver (A couple years he was one of the scions of a longtime, well respected family in town, and he was a good driver and was nice, I don't think he was a grandfather but he was grandfather age) took the route IN REVERSE so we saw parts of it we never saw, and the kids who normally got dropped off last got dropped off first, and it was actually kind of fun and neat because it was different.
(And it occurs to me: maybe one of the things that gives me malaise is that I don't have enough simple little "different" things in my life right now, given that I kind of live surrounded by "nothing," so there's nowhere much to go and see or do different things. A little while back I went to the new Aldi and it was surprisingly enjoyable - I do think I haven't done enough that's even a little different and I wound up in a rut. And I don't know how to avoid it, as I said it's hard to find things here in town - and given what's going on in the world, I suspect I'm going to have to cut back on gasoline usage as prices spike up)
I was also driving home today from the Budget Meeting, and passed one of the local restaurants, and saw a couple young teen girls *skipping* together out to the car (Well, fsvo "young" - they were probably 16) and I wondered to myself if part of aging is losing the capacity for that kind of simple delight. I mean, I could not skip like that now (not physically, I don't trust my knee not to buckle on me with that kind of a jump) but also I don't.....tend to FEEL that kind of easy delight any more. And I don't know how to get it back. Or maybe I actually never had it and I'm misremembering? It's just, sometimes these days I feel a lack, and I wonder how to get what it feels like I am missing.
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