The Greener Pastures

It was snowing Tuesday morning as I drove in the dark to school. I had sloshed through a meager quarter-inch of melted snow on the sidewalk, and by now, twenty minutes before dawn, it was too warm for the snow to stick to pavement. My tires squeaked along merrily on the shining black road, as I rounded the corner onto Greenwood and the tragic snow splashed down heavily ahead of me. It was not even white enough to show up in the headlights, only identified by the crystalline puddles it made on my windshield, cold and grainy like ancient photographs. If this day were the setting of a book I was just beginning, I would gird myself up for doom, for disaster. As it was, I was already bracing for the day. Wild students, a tired young teacher, a dark, wet day that would have been a snow day except that we're slowly melting the earth by a process I haven't yet gotten around to understanding.

I pushed into a breath of warmth in my classroom, pulled up the shades to realized that it had stopped snowing exactly as the sun came up dimly from behind the clouds. I looked at the floor of my classroom, which I still remembered sparkling clean at the beginning of the year. It read like a log of the past few months, like the tabletop at my parents' house, where somewhere in the wood grain are the remains of my uncle's algebra homework and my mother's sewing projects. Over there was where the boys were rough housing during break and spilled a carton of chocolate milk. There's the splashes of hot cocoa from the holiday party. Here's the splashes of chalk dust that a certain student made when he used to violently throw the erasers at the floor.

Sitting down at my desk, reflecting on the affectionate chaos of the day before, our first day back from vacation, I was prepared to look at the dusty floor with a shrug. Floors get dirty, I thought. Kids spill milk. No use crying, right? I returned to that room hours later, dusty and exhausted from a day of research in the library, my feet sore from circling the computer lab, my head hurting from the endless tapping of chair levers, and my ears still echoing with the day's chief command, "No, don't you roll your chair over to me. Stand up, for heaven's sake. Stop rolling!" The floor did not look so good then. In fact, it was so dirty that I would have mopped it if I didn't have to prepare a plan for a substitute. So I glared at the floor while gleefully writing Post-It notes to the sub, contemplating the one-day retreat ahead.

I was going to a training. I look forward to trainings several reasons. They afford me hours at a time where I need not say anything if I don't want to do so. I can simply listen, luxuriating in the deep bliss of having nothing to do but learn. I am allowed to interact with adults, to stay mostly clean and neat, and to drive downtown, staring at the tall buildings and dreaming of what it would be like to commute. Trainings are a novelty, a brief shake-up in the routines of my life. I had an unusually nebulous concept of what this one was about, but I was excited, all the same.

The next day, at lunch, I found myself staring down an Escher-esque hall on the upper floor of our district headquarter building. The training, for which I had held such high hopes, had already proved to be dull, and would have been disillusioning if I had been paying better attention. I had escaped for a moment from lunch to find a past mentor, who I suspected had an office somewhere up here. The "up here" has always seemed clean and quiet, if a bit sterile, and on harrowing school days I think with longing of their giant windows and cool grey carpets that are probably free of chocolate milk puddles.

This hallway, though, is different. It is colorless and silent, and endlessly long--so long that I suspect an illusion, some kind of mirror trick, and wave to see if I can find a tiny Kristi waving back in the distance. In the absence of a mirror, I venture down the hall, which has windows along one side and the grey cloth walls and doorways of cubicles on the other.

The dull buzzing of the cubicle floor simply adds to the grim impression this day has already made. Many times throughout the morning, I have stared at the clock and daydreamed of the activities I had planned for my students in my absence, wondering who was making trouble and who was going to finish his or her project on time. In the hesitant, testing-the-waters questions of my colleagues, I begin to crave the straightforwardness of teenagers. I long to get up and move, to be involved directly in the learning of another person, rather than manipulating a garble of hypothesis and data. I can squint and see myself, an educational consultant or a district employee. I can see myself clicking through the PowerPoint and saying the right words, the words I still remember because I was in college just moments ago. But as I walk down the quiet hallway, thinking how very different is the colorful hall outside of Room 120, I know I wouldn't be happy here.

I reach my mentor's cubicle after miles of hallway, turn to the left and meet her smiling welcome. She tells be about her newest job, tells me about the pre-school teacher she is just heading out to observe. She is happy this year, doing something she loves and believes in, working with students she knows she can help. We talk about some students we shared, about the direction in which my career is heading, about the future and the past. After a delightful ten minutes, I have to return to the training and she has to go out to a school, so we turn down the long hall.

"So, you have your own little cubicle down here," I comment unnecessarily. I don't mean to be pejorative, though I am immediately afraid she'll take it as such.

I am staring down the hall, down to where I'll need to find the stairs and return to the training like far less than my own classroom. She is looking out the window.

"Yes," she nods, looking with deep satisfaction at the sky that is starting to clear up. "And I have a window!"