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graduation

THE LAST DAY OF SCHOOL

THE LAST DAY OF SCHOOL

Things to do today:

1. Run final exams through scantron machine.

2. Learn how to use scantron machine.

3. Contemplate contacting the NYS Department of Education to inform them that I never once gave a multiple-choice test before they decided to (again) change the academic standards and I’m relatively certain that bullshit exams measure absolutely nothing besides the ability to memorize trivia.

4. Check in with a student (or six, just to be sure) to confirm that this year’s senior prank will not involve mice.

5. If the prank will involve mice, write a letter of resignation immediately because I can deal with rising heat and the conflagration of senioritis and colleagues who never ever shut up – but I will not deal with rodents or vermin of any kind because I've got limits.

Things to do today:

1. Get Patrick and Beth to sign my yearbook during lunch.

2. Go to the tailor after school with my mom to make sure my dress was taken in enough that my nipples will not be mistaken for accessories on prom night.

3. Buy more Aussie sprunch spray. 

4. Tell Mr. Gavriluk how much he’s meant to me and that I appreciate how he read all my poetry and then offered me insightful comments and didn't once tell me that any of the pain I wrote about in a non-rhyming kind of verse was at all pathetic – even though we both know it kind of is.

5. Kill the guy who broke my heart – or just avoid having to see him because plotting a death takes energy and I have exactly none on this strange day in June.

 

MAY

MAY

About five or six years ago, I presented a workshop during an annual school event to middle school students who were selected to come up to the high school for the day.  As my actual students had written, produced, directed, and edited documentary shorts that the little ones would be watching later (“Is it appropriate for a twelve year old to watch a documentary on piercings that starts with the extreme close-up of a nipple?” I wondered – probably too late.  But then I thought, “Fuck it; it’s a male nipple.  The kids will be fine.”), I did an activity about how to turn a defining moment each kid has experienced into a documentary film.  

I had never taught such little people before, and I was actually terrified.  I was scared I wouldn’t know what to say to them or that I’d make jokes they wouldn’t get or that they would just sit there and stare at me – like some of my actual students do, though after ten minutes, that just feels weird – but the group who toddled up to the high school were kids who had entered and won an essay contest to attend the event.  They wanted to be there.  They liked school.  And they all raised their hands immediately whenever I so much as spoke a sentence that mildly ended with an upwards question-like inflection.