next year, I teach literature again

One small truth: I have become better at Instagram than blogging. The news has already been shared there, but perhaps that's because this change feels like it needs so many words, and I haven't had the moment to sit down and process all the words that are battering about inside of me. Instagram is a place of little language; instead, time is marked by image. I have felt quiet in this decision, this change in my life, perhaps because this change is so very personal. Because of that, it was so very hard. My children are tied to this decision, in their own ways. (They, too, are returning to public school, though each of us for our own reasons, each holding a great deal of nervousness and excitement.)

I have resigned my position at the local Montessori school and am returning to the local high school, where I taught a decade ago. (In the meantime: I got an MFA, adjuncted at two colleges, taught and still teach online workshops, and spent two years at the Montessori school where my children attended.)

I can be a hasty decision maker. I've been known to hear a good idea and fly at it, unknowing that something had been percolating to make that casual suggestion a steaming reality. My press is one example of that kind of decision making: big and impulsive and exactly right. I have not regretted that plunge one bit. The way tulips come in spring: sudden and with great relief.

This decision was more of a seed that grew though. Returning to English rooted right into the heart of me and was fed by so many factors, so many considerations and events. It grew so slowly, not like spring in its great burst, but in the way that a beautiful tree can gather rings over time.

My marriage, interestingly, has been both of these processes at once: when I met him, I fell in love, and within weeks, I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him. But our relationship is slow, too: we didn't get engaged until we had been together for seven years, and that was fine. We owned a house first, and now, we've been together for nineteen years. We have children and chickens and it's never, ever been wrong. Not one second have I regretted this partnership. We are the seed and the root and the rings and the flower and all of its petals.

I have a list of professions I would have liked to try out if I hadn't found literature such an immediate and urgent passion for me. When I was little, I wanted to be an astronaut. When I was little, I wanted to be a paleontologist.

When I was in second grade, I read The Diary of Anne Frank, and everything changed.

I'm beyond thrilled to return to the English classroom, and I'm honored that the local high school has hired me on. I'm awaiting to hear my specific assignment and excited to spend my summer roughing out plans and reading the books I will teach.

And in the mail yesterday: a gift to myself. A planner thick with possibility. I was even able to have record pages added to the back, which means this planner will become a bit of a valuable object, a security of sorts. An object of potential.

I ought to add: I appreciate the online record keeping systems as well, but there's something about it getting worked out on the page first, the muscular connection of hand to mind, the physicality of memory and thought, the quick flip of pages and evidence of that effort, that work: here it is, my record of a year. This is the landscape, and I carry it with me.

And as you can see, this teacher is ready. I'll look at this book for many hours in the yellowy light of our dining room table.

I'll start in pencil because that is how I plan--with adaptability in mind. Later, I write in pen: this is how the lesson went, this is how I could do it differently, these are the things that actually matter. How it went and how it will change because as teachers, we're always editing our selves and trying for better. It will never be perfect, and so much of that is because each group of students is comprised of individuals who all have very different needs. Lesson planning is a kind of puzzle making: this text with these students at this time of year with these current events. Reflection comes in pen, with permanence at the honesty of how-it-went. Ideas for how-it-could-go again.

I have dreams about moving into the classroom I haven't seen yet. Last night, I dreamed the previous teacher hadn't moved out, and there were odd objects in the room: an old stereo system, textbooks and crumbling paperbacks with library tags on them, a giant tin duck with maps modge podged onto it. I fussed over how the desks would go, grouping them in pods, moving the teacher-desk around the room. Here and here and here, perhaps. I dreamed my first week plans flopped, but I approached the next with intense vigor: this time it will go differently! I dreamed of hallways that resembled that of my own high school, which has been long reconstructed over. I've dreamed of classes of students filtering in, ready for me to tell them how to proceed, while I'm still pulling the things of the teacher before me from the shelves. I've dreamed of one student shaking my hand, welcoming me to the high school, pleased at my arrival.

I was told by the principal, actually, that the school is undergoing renovations over the summer, and he hoped we'd be back in by staff week, and if not, we would all be unboxing, so I wouldn't be the only one. I remembered the weeks before this past school year started, with a leak in the ceiling, heaps of broken-down walls on the floor, and the way it all came together despite construction's best efforts to declare otherwise.

My principal and I spoke about flexibility and it being so key to our profession. I think to writing in pencil, and then in pen.