By the time we came back, there were eight days left of the school year, but only six days left for my kindergarteners. Teachers came back from a seven-day strike having won higher pay and more supports for students, but quickly realised that there was a mountain of work for us to catch-up on before the last day of school. Resuming lessons, closing out units, returning student work, typing up report cards, printing off homework packets, and organising class parties and graduations.
At the end of every year, I always get asked if I’m going to miss my kids. I often jokingly reply that by the time it gets to May, I’m getting ready to push them out of my room and they’re running away from me. We’re with each other all day, every day, for seven months, I tell people. By the end, we all need a break. And it’s true, or at least partially so. The reality is though the last days of school feel a lot like all the days that came before — running around trying to get stuff done, with some pauses throughout the day where I jump in to play with my kids and ask them for a hug where I might squeeze them a little too tight.
And so that’s how we spent the last days of school. Playing card games with our sight words, completing writing projects reflecting on the year, finishing i-Ready computer assessments, making hand print artwork, riding around the yard on bikes and scooters, getting into fights over the bikes and scooters, and singing “Peaches” from The Super Mario Bros. Movie at the top of our voices.
I’ve spent the last nearly twenty-five years in school. For almost my entire life, usually from eight in the morning to four in the afternoon, I have been in a classroom, as a student, then a student teacher, and now a teacher. If it all works out — and it will — I’ll spend the next twenty-five years in the same way. For all their imperfections and complications and problems, there remains something so powerful to me about schools and the learning that takes place within them.
When I reflect on a year of teaching, or my four years in college, or my time in boarding school, I am left to conclude that an education is something magical. An education transforms letters into words into stories. An education transforms strangers into classmates into best friends. An education transformed an insecure bookworm-slash-tomboy, into a loud and bossy teenager, into a surprisingly patient teacher. Transformations only made possible by the lessons and love poured into me by teachers and classmates and coaches and principals and deans, and I believe that all kids deserve the same.
As I finish my third year in the classroom, what have I learned about education, especially in comparison and in conversation with my years as a student? What have I learned about schools and how they work and how might they work better for everyone? What have I understood the purpose of education to be throughout my own experiences and how do I see myself growing best in a way that serves my kids, my community, and also, myself?
When I picked up my class in the auditorium on the morning of the kindergarten graduation, I burst into laughter when I saw that one of my students and I were dressed in the exact same outfit — Black blazer, white shirt, blue jeans, and he out-dressed me, no questions asked. We all walked together for the last time to the classroom where they ate dry cereal and apples, decked out in formal shirts and sparkly dresses and an assortment of fresh braids, pristine ponytails, and tightened dreads. Then back to the auditorium we went for the ceremony.
In my usual Ms. Simba fashion, I took this fun and celebratory event as an opportunity to stress out, fussing about getting kids lined up in alphabetical order, making sure every student’s certificate was printed out, and scoping out the room to see where each parent was so I could point them out to the kids as we got ready to walk down the red carpet. And, of course, it all went off without a hitch, with every small fire immediately put out, as the kids sat in the front, bored and fidgeting, with a room full of adults beaming at them with palpable pride and joy.
The ceremony ended and the room exploded with cheers and music. Families came up to thank me for the year, take pictures of me and their kids, and ask logistical questions about when they could leave and what day summer school started. I ran around, making sure to hug every student I could see and to thank parents profusely back for replying to my texts and chaperoning field trips and feeding us cupcakes and hot links and Costco pizza. And then, that was that.
Being a teacher is a lot like being a student. For both, the purpose of education is to learn and to grow and to try and be better each and every day. But being a teacher is also nothing like being a student. The purpose of education for teachers is to give, whether it is knowledge or care or grace or a sense of safety, in order to create the conditions to make learning, growth, and betterment even possible. And where we fail at giving students those things, the consequences are heavy and catastrophic for us all.
I have been in a lot of schools over the past twenty-seven years of my life. Pre-school, elementary school, secondary school, college, pre-school again, graduate school, and now elementary school again. Over the last few years, I have become increasingly disinterested around “good school/bad school” narratives and more intrigued in reflections on what makes different schools work and what can be learned from them. I’ve learned that schools work when students are taught about the world around them, the world beyond, and how to understand and read different contexts on their own. I’ve learned that schools work when they give students the space to choose who they want to be, and the tools to succeed in whatever fields they embark on. I’ve learned that schools work when students feel affirmed and protected and looked after in ways that they can then apply to how they treat others and how they treat themselves. I’ve seen schools quietly pulling off these feats across a range of contexts, and I’ve also seen the barriers of racism, sexism, classism, ableism, homophobia, xenophobia, and more deny systematically students the opportunities to learn, and be who they want to be, and feel unconditional love by their peers and those entrusted to watch over them. And how can we expect students to not only survive but to thrive without doing all that we can to provide them with the best version of an education?
As a student, I believed that the purpose of education was to learn everything so that I could be anything. That thinking got me through my own K-12 experiences and led me to where I am today, also in no small part to my own unearned privileges and advantages. As a teacher though, I am learning that there is so much more to an education. It isn’t enough for me to teach my kids everything, I want them to be able to understand and consider and apply, beyond rote memorisation. It isn’t enough for me to prepare my kids to be anything professionally, I want them to be able to navigate the world social-emotionally, using the experiences and tools they learn from school experiences. By doing so, my hope would be to foster communities that begin in my classroom and go out into the world filled with critical thinkers, enthusiastic learners, and sensitive human beings. And I want to start with myself, pushing to understand more deeply all that is around me, making sure that I am open and receptive to new perspective and experiences, and trying to do better when it comes to being kind and considerate towards other and towards myself. I think we could all do with more of that.
After all the kids had gone, I stripped my classroom down to its August form. No more pictures on the walls or toys on the shelf, a blank start for the fresh group of kids that I would be meeting in the August to come. I put a lot of stuff in storage and even more in the trash, determined that when school started back up in the fall, I wanted to have a clutter-free, minimalistic space, filled with everything that we need and absent of all the excess that we didn’t.
Less than two weeks after saying goodbye to my kids, I was going to be saying hello to a new group of summer school babies at a different site — East Oakland instead of West — trying to learn from new communities of students, families, and teachers, so that I can bring those lessons and new growth to my school when we officially start back up. My goal is to make a career out of getting better, through professional learning groups and educator-led conferences and whatever other spaces I stumble upon so that my kids get the best version of me in the classroom, because that’s what they deserve.
And I’ll keep writing it all down. A little bit for others, but mostly for myself, trying to make sense of what it all means. These classrooms and playgrounds and Zoom rooms and soccer pitches, and all the kids and teenagers and young adults and grown-ups that make up an education. That create magic everyday. I’ll keep a record to try and tell a story that tells the truth about how it wasn’t all bad. That through all the good, all the bad, and all the in-between taking place in the world, students came to school, teachers met them there, and it was an education for all, transforming them and the world to come.