Encore!

Another school year: done.

I love the dismantling that happens after the kids leave. For months this place has been made just so, and it takes just moments for the entire accumulation process to be set in reverse. Posters are first in the line of fire, but sooner or later everything is headed either to a drawer or the trash. The recycling bins were stuffed with homework this afternoon.

I’ve never been involved with anything theatrical (ok fine once) but I imagine it’s similar to what it feels like to strike the set the day after everything closes. Everything of significance has got to go. It’s all trash now, but just a few hours before the whole thing was whatever it is you call trash’s opposite. This stuff was indisposable by mutual assent. Now: nah.

And what that made me think of was the artifice of this whole enterprise. School is such a weird performance of the strangest kind of pretend — they call me ‘mister’! People sometimes point to the artificiality of schools as a critique: this isn’t what learning looks like in its natural state. And of course that’s exactly right, it’s not. It’s all fake. And that guy up on the stage — did you know he’s not really a wizard?

Teaching is weird, it’s fake. Teaching is not medicine. Medicine is someone is sick and you can help them, the most natural thing in the world. Driving a cab is not weird. People want to get to x, they pay you to take them there. Natural. Getting paid to cook people food is a reasonable transaction, it is not a weird. Lawyering, on the other hand: super weird. And as long as we’re on the topic: basketball player, musician, researcher, middle manager, writer, actor, teacher, weirdos all.

So it’s summer and the show is over and all but, come autumn, let’s do it again! I’ve got a school I love working at and I’m ready to play pretend for another year. Year nine is over.