Laughing With

An editor, a food columnist and two reporters are laughing at me.

At the end of the day, the newspaper staff is finally and busily engaged in meeting the first deadline of the year. My role as adviser (spelled with an "e" because the Associated Press delights in ugly spelling), last year fairly peripheral to the happenings of the newsroom, this year has taken a more definite shape. Part of the change has come with experience. After a year I know what I should do--and what I shouldn't do--as the one adult between the newspaper's production and its dissemination to a thousand students, faculty, parents and community members. I should encourage students to become active, curious and outgoing members of our community, teaching them how to ask the right questions, and keep asking them, until they are the true voice of the student body. I shouldn't write their articles, express too much of my own opinions in school controversies, or tell them all the answers to the questions I make them write.

The rest of my adviser transformation resulted from the graduation of ten staff members last spring. With only four students who remember "the way it was last year," Because of this, I have remarkable freedom to mold class policy and procedure, as well as the responsibility of creating an interdependent team from a group of near-strangers. And unlike the passionate but essentially homogenous cadre of writers who left, I have begun this year with a near-perfect cross-section of our school. Some have come because they are new to Ingraham looking for a place to get involved. Some are making up Language Arts credit. Some love writing more than anything, and have added this elective to a collection of other writing electives. Whatever the motive, this newspaper staff comes from three grades, five countries and all levels of skill and experience.

So it is with a sense of relief that I am able, today, to sit down at my desk in the corner, melting into the background of advisership, while students who didn't know each other a few weeks ago live out a commercial for teambuilding games. They're brainstorming and writing, going over notes from interviews and snapping headshots. All is well.

I feel invisible for a while, in the corner of my classroom I've turned into an office, and pull out a stack of papers to grade. I never graded much in sixth period last year, since I usually did most of that during my planning period. This year, though, I am teaching all six classes, and thus have no more planning time during the day. It was a decision fraught with ambitious bravado ("I'm young and invincible!"), passive greed ("I guess it would be nice to make more money") and dubious altruism ("It really is better for he kids to be in five small classes than four huge ones"); but for better or worse, it's done and I am teaching all the time. No more planning periods for busy scheming, tea-aided unwinding, the rest of not saying any words for a while. No more mid-day writing myself back into love with students and teaching; all of it will have to wait, now, for mad lunches and listless after school hours.

Now, with sixth period going so well, I risk some multi-tasking. It's only after about ten minutes that I remember I'm still technically teaching a class, and I only remember because the table of girls nearest me starts to laugh at me. They're only laughing, I realize, because I was laughing first.

"What are you giggling at?" Food Columnist demands.

"The ninth graders. This assignment," I reply, holding up the papers.

"I didn't think teachers liked grading."

"Well, these are really funny. They were supposed to write a letter from an object in the room. And this one is from this kid's cell phone. 'This shouldn't come as a surprise to you, man. You know how you push my buttons.'"

The girls laugh, and Opinions Editor recalls when she did the assignment as a freshman, what she wrote about. I go back to reading. They are funny. This is the fourth time I have taught this class, this book, and by now I have saved only the assignments that I love, including this personification of an inanimate object in the room. I've read letters from the newly-installed carpet, demanding better treatment from careless, paper-shredding kids. Students have given voice to the clock, who is insecure because everyone is always looking at him; to the plastic crown that hangs above the white board and doesn't get along with the American flag next door; to the rubber duck that wishes I'd rotate him ninety degrees so that he could look back at the classroom instead of out the window. Yesterday we spent a solid twenty minutes sympathizing with things that cannot feel.

In strictly standards-based, literary language, I'm not sure that I could save this lesson from the coldness of an aligned curriculum. Yes, they have a better sense of personification, but more as the opposite of objectification than as the "description of non-humans in human terms." I could loosely connect it to letter-writing form. In terms of the soul-building that is tacitly inherent to most English classes, if we spend time searching for how something else might feel perhaps we will be able to do the same with one another. How would I feel, think, act if I were in that person's shoes? Yes, I justify after the fact, I'll connect back to this when we return to perspectives, again and again, throughout the year.

But as I'm reading letters from shoes and white boards, I feel like the chief value of this assignment is that it made us laugh for two days. It's been an exhausting beginning, this year, so much so that at times I've lost my footing of care and compassion for my students in the winds of weariness. Yesterday as I offered the beginnings of stories and characters, and now as I read them at the end of a long day, I'm filled with gratefulness for the creativity of kids who are still young enough to take an odd assignment and make it into something wonderful and unique. When I'm laughing, in sixth period, reading bits of the letters aloud at the request of Food Columnist and Student Life Editor, I'm not tired. Or it doesn't matter that I'm tired.

Go with this weirdness, I told them yesterday as they wrote. It will be fun.

It is.

Red Fern Meets Manual Math

More kids than I had ever seen were playing around a big red brick building. I thought some rich man lived there and was giving a party for his children. Walking up to the edge of the playground, I stopped to watch.

The boys and girls were about my age, and were thick as flies around a sorghum mill. They were milling, running, and jumping. Teeter-totters and swings were loaded down with them. Everyone was laughing and having a big time.

Wilson Rawls, from Where the Red Fern Grows

Walking around with my thumb in a paperback library copy of Rawls's classic, I'm proctoring a test in the library computer lab today. Students have rolled lazily up to the banks of computers and are now staring at screens, mostly quiet. It's the time of test-giving--after I've read all the material for my next lesson and sketched out the shape of the next few weeks of lessons--when I run out of things to do. Since I'm feeling neither tired enough to stare blankly at the Seattle Weekly online nor adventurous enough to peruse the T encyclopedia like my co-proctor, at the suggestion of a friend I'm reading about Billy and his two "hunting hounds" a few paragraphs at a time between my rounds of over-the-shoulder digital eavesdropping.

With outspoken scorn for "dog stories where the dog always dies," I've been resisting Where the Red Fern Grows for a while. It's a pity, actually, because I probably would have loved it if I'd read it when everyone else did, back in the fifth grade. Replete with vernal descriptions of the Ozark Mountains and thrifty, no-nonsense characters, the story would have fit well on the heels of my Little House on the Prairie obsession. As it is, I'm reading about the boy saving up for two hunting hounds and remembering not what it felt like to desperately want a dog (I've never wanted that), but instead the thoughts of the fifth-grader who read about prairies and schoolteachers and Indians and horses and sighed that her mountains, the mundane Cascades, could never be as interesting as the magical Dakota Territory.

It's the silence that first makes me look up from the novel, which has stalled for pages and pages at the love at first sight that Billy bears for his new dogs. For a room full of kids on computers, the lab is actually mostly quiet, and I watch the noiseless labor of the test takers. Everywhere I look, students are clearly in action, and after a second I remember the reason. They are taking a math test.

Watching students do math reminds me more of being in school than any other subject. Perhaps it's because most of the circumstances in which this happens are, like this one, tests on which I'm forbidden to help. There are other times when I'm vaguely aware that their homework assignments are beyond me and don't venture into the embarrassing territory of technique I've forgotten or--sometimes--never really knew. On occasion, though, when I decide to wade into a math problem, offering the much-caveated help that I can, my problem solving looks just like theirs right now.

My students' fingers are counting corners and angles on the screens, manipulating shapes by turning them in thin air and trying to imagine their path, and adding up averages manually. They scribble down whatever they know they must remember, making hesitant columns of long division and uneven geometry sketches. Their processes are on the surface, not mysterious or hidden, like with each new problem they evaluate and then roll up their sleeves, holding their breath and dodging obstacles as they arrive.

This is how I do math, too. Since there are no more tests, for now, I can enjoy the clean and ordered challenge of occasionally assisting on an algebra problem without fear. Writing has sunk below the surface for me, so saturating my thoughts and fingers that sometimes it seems to just happen, but with math the learning and the labor are still just as visible. I remember what it's like to pull on an equation like a gigantic knot, testing it for weaknesses that will lead to its untangling, or how sometimes the best way of thinking about a triangle's rotation is just to squeeze your eyes shut and twist your head around. It's not scientific, not the intuition that my calculus teacher always hoped to instill, but it worked for me as it seems to work for them.

As I go back to the book, just as Billy finally stows his puppies in a sack in order to transport them home, I pause in the intersection of my childhood passion--books about the country and hard living--and my childhood nemesis--math problems--and for a wildly nostalgic instant I'm intensely grateful for both, ghosts of school that remind me what it's like to be here.

Reading and Riding

Once an approaching dog is spotted, a good rider response is to slow, including a downshift, then accelerate past the point of interception. Don't kick at the dog because it will make controlling the motorcycle difficult.

from "Basic Rider Course" (Washington Motorcycle Safety)

“So complete this sentence—write it out on the card—‘The best book I’ve ever read is…’”

Some students laugh nervous, first-day-of-school laughs. Unwilling to point out their issue with my premise—the “best” of the sentence—they giggle and look anywhere but at me. Unwise to reveal on the first day, they must reason, our essential skepticism about the entire subject of Language Arts. But still how, they demand in their red-faced giggles, could any book be good enough to deserve to be called the best?

This is the fifth first day of school for me at IHS, including the one I spent during my student teaching, and they’ve all been very much the same, an energetic tangle of happy greetings and frantic rehabilitating of classroom management techniques from their summer atrophy.

It’s true, this one is a little more chaotic usual. Our entire school day has shifted fifteen minutes later, so that we watch our familiar class-ending times slide by, no longer momentous. Irate fellow teachers are still looking for furniture and boxes lost in the summer move, necessitated by new carpet that was an extremely unpopular district mandate. Scheduling and staffing upheaval has forced many of us to teach new subjects or, like me, to take on extra classes entirely. Though I’m bothered by neither the new schedule nor the carpet, I’m exhausted by the time I get to my fifth ninth grade Language Arts class. I’m missing the kids I know—now in tenth and eleventh grade—and weary of meeting new people, even the spectacularly interesting ones that have come through the doors today.

“Do like kid books count?” someone asks me.

“Definitely. One of the best books I’ve ever read is Yertle the Turtle.”

They return to their blue cards, the cards that introduce them to responding to a prompt, talking in small groups, and sharing in the large-group setting. I can see some of them still frowning, trying to remember a time that they liked a book.

I’ve written before about the disconnect between struggling students and the teachers who instruct on the subjects that they love best. Though I can try to imagine not liking a book just because it’s a book, I’ve never experienced the prejudice myself. Nor have I ever began an English class with a certainty that I won’t do well. Even in disciplines I care little about, I’ve always come to class with confidence that I can succeed. At the end of the summer, though, I stumbled upon humility—even empathy—in the unlikeliest of places.


On the last Sunday in August, pristine and splendid, I found myself terrified and fourth in line to take the final riding exam for my Washington Motorcycle Safety Course. If I passed, I could get a motorcycle endorsement on my driver’s license and legally drive the 125 scooter that I desire. If I failed, I couldn’t do that. I also, obscurely, would add this non-skill to a long list of other driving ineptitude. The near failure of driver’s education, the two attempts to learn manual transmission and numerous minor dents and scratches loomed large in the disappointing background as I considered this next hurdle. As I’d done poorly on those, so I must be headed for disgrace here.

The class itself, several hours of classroom and riding instruction over the two previous days, was an overwhelmingly good time. After electing to learn the simpler scooter and not the more complex motorcycle operation—requiring the mastery of the wicked clutch that’s haunted me for a decade—I enjoyed every minute of driving instruction. I wove through cones with ease, eeling elated at the weightless fluidity with which I could turn the little machine. The instructors, good-humored experienced riders on their elegant cruisers and ponderous touring bikes, showered us in encouragements, from thumbs raised in approval to the mysterious comment, “Kristi, I think you’ll be riding a big Harley in about five years.” Right, I thought. But still.

I’m wondering today, as I watch these students I don’t know try to remember a book they’ve read and liked, about the failures we carry around with us. Wondering what mistakes or dismissals my students bring with them to high school when they arrive in Language Arts class and believe—one the first day—that they can’t do it. It’s easy, I want to tell them. Just show up and keep doing what I’m telling you. Just read the book. Just write!

Just roll a little on the throttle to make the curve faster. Just slow down a little and your turns won’t be so wide. Just press down on your handlebar and lean in the direction you’re going. Just don’t look at the cones!

Just, just, just. So simple to just give advice about the thing that you know and love.

I passed my riding test with shaky grace, hitting none of the cones but taking some corners with a hesitant slowness that lost me three points. Out of one hundred. I left the motorcycle class feeling like I had just learned a new language and grown another few inches. I thought I couldn’t and I did. I left thinking about the value of encouragement, having learned as much about teaching as I did about riding a scooter, and thankful for the instructors who didn’t comment on my uncertainty, didn’t focus on the confidence I didn’t have.

The first day of school is new territory for all of us. For the ninth graders, poured into one class from different middle schools and cities, states and nations, it is a new school, one or several subjects that they’ve never succeeded in before. For me it’s 160 new voices and faces and stories and habits, strangers when I have trouble believing that I could possibly love any class as the ones I taught last June. (It’s always been like that, and I always have.) And yet, as I read over shoulders and see in unfamiliar letters the names of books enjoyed or merely tolerated, I can suddenly remember how it felt, ninth grade and meeting people and trying so so hard to figure out what’s going on all the time. I remember some of it from motorcycle class, and most of it because things change for me, too, every fall. For better or worse, we stand together on new carpet, fifteen minutes later than last year, united in uncertainty and, perhaps, in the hope of a new beginning.

Of Twists and Moments

The Jar

The past is a change jar,
waiting dusty on top of the bookshelf.
To be used
when only coins will do,
not for the water bill
or next years’ school supplies.

I’ve broken down the dollars of years
—common and bland and shabby—
to imperishable small change moments:
Quarter pancakes on a snow day
Dime compliments
Penny glances
Nickel smiles
Half-dollar kiss,
rare and precious and interesting.

The way we wash dishes
after everyone goes home:
Worth about $2.17 in various coins.

The jar of change
—a piggy bank of generosity and goodness and love—
waits for days when I’m broke in the present.
When the tax of solitude is too high,
when criticism fines my already-low balance
and tollbooths loom ahead.

And on those poorest todays
I pull out a handful of moments,
turn them over and over until they are worn like pearls.
Coated with a lifetime of dust,
some are bright and new
and others gleam dully, worn with use.

That day when we
That summer when they
That night when I

And though I spend them
they are never gone.

A poem written for and to Period One
(as an example of extended metaphor)

I left my classroom as messy as it’s ever been. Skyscrapers of paper lean against the wall by the door. The desks huddle together in the center of the room, staying where I pushed them out of the way so I could climb on a cabinet and take down curtains covered in two years’ dust. The blue paint on the bulletin boards is starting to chip off, worn away when I removed the hundreds of staples and thumbtacks that held up flyers, grades, ad prices, photos and phone numbers. The furniture that I like is flagged with the blue labels of moving redemption; the rest have gone into exile, supposedly to a furniture graveyard underneath Memorial Stadium. Room 120, chaotic and awaiting new carpet and desks, won’t be resting this summer.

The school year ended like this, loose-ended, some details unresolved, some tasks incomplete. It ended with a sigh and a shrug, teenage-style, on a cloudy day and in the midst of cardboard and labels and packing tape.

It ended with a twist I would have scoffed at if it I’d read it in fiction. After spending a month planning for unemployment, daydreaming about traveling and mourning the loss of this school that I love, I was recalled to my job for the 2009-2010 school year. It is the last-minute reprieve of an author whose essential outlook on life changes mid-sentence, who doesn’t go back to rewrite the book but instead leaves it as is, strange and inconsistent. And yet, disorienting as it is, I am grateful. Questions of where I belong return to the background for a while; against all odds, I’m coming back for another year.

Like a cloudy last day of school, I’m excited and a little gloomy. I’m returning, but three of my favorite colleagues are not, a reality lost on me when all four of us were departing together. So it’s impossible to write a neat ending for the school year, as much as the writer in me desires to tie it up with a few words and an overall theme, or as a friend puts it, a “moral” for the year. I can only plead that lately I’ve been learning that reality defies this kind of metaphorization; in the end, I’m left with a scattered jar of moments to ponder in all their variety.

Period Four shrieks in rage when the bell dismissed class during The Merchant of Venice, leaving Antonio awaiting the legal doom of Shylock’s knife. They leave with the reluctant confession that they’re interested.

An assembly line of Friends of the Cascade fill our April newspaper with flyers that said “Josy, will you go to prom with me?” from one of the editors-in-chief to our artistic layout assistant.

I spend a 23-hour day with the Class of 2009, punctuated with an original song by one of our teachers, the first speech I’ve ever written, and a standing ovation from the students I’ve known and loved best so far.

The non-senior remainder of my journalism staff creates a farewell newspaper for me in three days, after which they declare, “We did all this! We can do the paper next year!”

Seniors on a post-graduation vacation call my classroom to see if I did indeed get hired back. They pass a cell phone around to confirm the news.

I moderate the poetry blog, kept up by a few students who call themselves the Ninth Wall Rebels, and discover genuine talent and thought-provoking dialogue, realizing once again that ninth graders are cleverer than anyone—even me—ever guesses at the beginning.

I’ve loved these days. Thanks, and have a spectacular summer.

The Ninth Wall

It's just barely eight o'clock when I finish giving the instructions. Even as I was talking about specific praise and constructive criticism (or, How to Comment on a Blog Post and Sound Absolutely Brilliant), I could tell that handing out the login instructions first was a mistake. I can see their monitors from the front of the computer lab, can see them hopping from screen to screen with feline technological agility.

"OK, I need to see all of your faces." Seven faces turn back to me, patient and silent, from where they were doubtless programming for the Defense Department or winning the 2015 Pulitzer. As soon as I start to speak they rotate back on swivel chairs, the magnetism of the more interesting Internet stealing them away.

This is by far the coolest thing I've done as a teacher. Usually I am comfortable with the marginal coolness bestowed on my because of my youth and the occasional instances in which I can mimic students with startling accuracy. That's fine, they shrug. You're not that bad. But you still like to write for fun and you don't go to the clubs on the weekend. And you think Shakespeare is great, so clearly you have taste issues.

This might be another Shakespeare--something that I think is spectacular and genius and my students just find annoying--but I suspect that our collaborative poetry blog, The Ninth Wall, might be cool on an absolute scale. I feel clever and edgy, excited for once about my relative youth instead of seeing it as a pitiful liability in these uncertain times. And that, for once, we might agree.

When I finally set them free to do so, they log in to the site with surprising ease. Since it took me almost three hours to work out the many kinks in this blog host and then create twenty-three profiles, I'm both relieved and a little bewildered at the fluency of their interaction with this completely unfamiliar medium. They find the obscure login at the corner of the page, quickly change their own passwords and move on to the poems they are supposed to be critiquing. I smile to compare this to the first day of poetry, a few weeks ago, which brought dozens of I can'ts and This is too hards from every corner of the room.

"Where's my comment?" someone asks, and I realize that I'm done instructing. They've taken over, essentially, but not in a hostile way. They have simply mastered what I thought was a strange concept, mastered it more quickly than I thought possible. They are commenting on the two poems that Ms. P and I posted for them to practice on. I return to my desk to moderate.

There are already six comments.

I scroll through the ones relating to the poem I posted, one that I had written on the overhead last week, when they challenged me to extend the ridiculous metaphor "The past is a jar of quarters."

This is great ms. dahlstrom the way you used the metaphores and it’s about money, and money keeps people happy all the time.

“The jar of change
—a piggy bank of generosity and goodness and love—”

I like how you used this metaphor to explain the greater meaning of the jar. I believe that you can improve your already excellent poem by adding a couple more similes.

great job on your imagery I felt as if i was there enjoying the snow with you

It’s improved since your last random quarter escapade on the projector.

It is a moment of breathtaking beauty, as I read the articulate and earnest critiques and approval from my students, commenting on my work for the first time. It is love, true and sincere.

Soon, they have each made their required "practice comment" on one of our poems, and they move on to typing up their own poems and posting them to the blog. After closing the loophole that let them use the comments as public instant messenger, I spend the last minutes of the classroom reading and publishing their submitted poems, lingering on their comments to one another.

Nice rhyme scheme.
Mr.Duck is ownage(;

I really love this poem especially how you use the seasons for phases of life. But you mightttt want to check the spelling on autumn.
(:

I like the smilie “Love is like the picture sitting in my mind over and over”, first post?:3

On the assignment sheet I handed out to them--written at the end of a long and incredibly stressful day--I had asked them to think of The Ninth Wall as "a big, magical refrigerator door, where we can put up all the things we're most proud of."

As I sit in the computer lab, approving comments and pre-reading poems, I realize it's not the refrigerator door we've created with our "collaborative poetry blog," home of originality and dialogue.

The Ninth Wall is our kitchen.

Please Sit on the Grass

Explain one of the following metaphors from pop music:

"Love is a battlefield."

"I am a rock."

"I'm a slave for you."

Journal Prompt, 5/27/09


I've never seen a class this lethargic. The usually riotous pre-lunch class is missing a few of its more rebellious members today, and the loud ones who remain seem to have lost courage. Or energy, if that's possible. They are melting into their seats like birthday candles inside a car, shrinking to liquid at the horrible thought of writing poetry.

This is one of those moments of painful teacher-student disconnect, when our tastes divide us so thoroughly that we're looking at the same lesson from different continents of experience and prejudice. I love this lesson, all of these lessons on poetry with which we're ending the year. I am still thinking about the metaphor from Period One--"the past is a jar of quarters"--still stretching it into form like a Silly Putty poetry, and that was three hours ago. These kids hate poetry, or something that they think of as poetry. When we began the unit last week, when I asked them to write down the "point" of poetry, they eagerly discarded poems as the worthless pursuit of beret-clad, cigarette-smoking, finger-snapping layabouts. Not for us, they wailed. You can't make us, they told me last week, and today they're demonstrating their passion for passive protest.

We make it, somehow, all the way to 11:30, through the analysis of Sylvia Plath's "Metaphors" and a poem called "War," written a few years ago by a student at Denny Middle School. They are impossibly even more listless now than at the beginning of class.

"So, pass everything up. All of it. The poems, your answers, everything. All you need out right now is your journal and a pencil. Yeah, clear the desks. Good." Some glacial movements bring us to a semi-ready state. "OK, new question. Raise your hand... and I need everyone to listen... raise your hand if you would be willing to sit on grass?"

Four students raise their hands, roll their eyes.

"Four? OK, never mind then."

The class seems to sense the missed opportunity, and it wakes them up a little.

"Wait, what did you say?"

"I asked if you would be willing to sit on grass."

"Like outside?"

"Outside. It's really nice out, and I kind of want to honor the twelve of you that actually chose to come to class today. Even though you're all asleep. But if only four of you will sit on the grass, we can't go."

"Vote again!" they cry. "I didn't hear."

"Of course not. One more time. Who'd sit out on the grass, if we went out?" Hands start to rise, waving like the tops of grass. "We need everyone for it to work. Total agreement. And... there it is! Let's go."

It takes a while to get everyone settled in a circle in the grass. The students who'd promised so eagerly to sit on the grass are now finding ants and the remnants of this morning's dew, making them hesitant to come down to our ground level. Once they are in the circle, they roll around and crane their necks to talk to the biology class that is collecting plant specimens, or the the stray truant students who are using their skipping-class time to wander the grounds. It's really funny, actually, all the fifteen-year-olds in the grass, balancing notebooks on their knees and looking everywhere but at me. At least they're caring about something.

Eventually I write the beginnings of simple metaphors on a legal pad, then hold them up for students to see before they spent a minute completing it in as many ways as possible.

"This one is 'Night is...' And don't write 'Night is dark.' Why not? Do you know? Because 'dark' is an...?"

"Adjective."

"Right. Night is a quilt from your grandma's house. Night is the underside of a rock on the beach. Night is..."

We write for a while, and get very little done. They argue about adjectives, argue about turning their metaphors to similes, argue about having to write at all when they're outside. We finish three minutes early, and they argue when I make them sit down until the bell rings faintly.

"Come on. Three minutes relaxing in the sun. Live it up. My gift to you."

In sunlit silence, contemplating our differences but enjoying the same spring morning, at last on the same invisible page, I take in the reality of the lesson, not perfect and far from metaphor.

Prom!

The events coordinator for Woodland Park Zoo finds me at 8:15 PM. I have a zebra-striped table runner tied around my waist, and a long stemmed bouquet of green and pink flowers in my hands.

"Are you still ready to let everyone in at 8:30?" she asks me.

I examine the room. It's a food court by day, but with black linens and square vases and tropical flowers and the whirling lights from the DJ's table by the window, you'd never know it now. We're waiting in a safari, elegant and cool in the evening of this hot May day, for the guests to arrive. After almost six months of planning, it's prom night at IHS, and we're ready.

"Yes. Definitely let them in," I reply, nodding.

Prom is the first of four events that I have helped to plan as the co-advisor of the Class of 2009, and by far the most complicated. This business is far out of my comfort zone. Never a party planner, most of my birthdays slide by without much ado, as I shrink away from the detail-ridden process of inviting, arranging, reserving, splitting checks, and other complications. Prom 2009 has been full of complication: We've spent hours on the phone with caterers and DJs and photographers or in meetings with the Prom Committee, voting on backgrounds and themes and decorating schemes. Though the students have been deeply invested in this project, helping at every step of the way, we're the ones in charge right now, as the students are still posing stereotypically and ordering hip urban food in stately gowns and tuxes. With the room ready, we retreat for a moment to change into pretty dresses and cardigans, then head outside to wait.

The gravel walk from the zoo gate to the pavilion is lined with votive candles, flickering in miniature fishbowls. Half a dozen teachers wait along the shadowy path, sipping coffee and chatting about the end of the year, of past proms and future plans. The first students arrive and we applaud, cheering for the ironed and proper look of rumpled boys in tuxes and the girl who wears a backwards baseball cap every day, tonight donning a cocktail dress and pristine black curls. As the sun sets and the candles glow, we squint through the dusk at each new face, disguised but so familiar. A camera dangles from my wrist, but I've never been excited about interrupting moments to take pictures. And this, the true promenade on the way to prom, is truly a moment.

It's a moment for them, certainly, but also for us, the teachers who welcome our guests, our students. This is the first class that I have seen all the way through, from the first day of freshman year until now, just two weeks before I stand on the stage and call them up to receive diplomas. In a way, we've been waiting for this forever--but it only feels like a few minutes. I've had time to learn names and faces, a few stories and some quirky personalities, and now they are on their way out. Just a moment, these four years.

It is a night of effusive celebrations. Perhaps the lights are a little too bright, and the process of naming the king and queen is awkward and slightly silly, but no one minds. Mostly they are happy to be together; I get the impression that the details are just a colorful background for friendships at their summit. With a swaying last slow song--which I swear was the same slow song that ended my own prom, seven years ago--it's over and they pour out, laughing and talking and shouting "2009" into the cool night.

"All that planning!" sighs my co-advisor.

"All that money!" I laugh in reply.

"No drama!" congratulates the principal. "No drunk kids."

Only a few more steps and we'll be parting ways for good. Whether or not my co-advisor and I, both facing the loss of our jobs, make it back to IHS, these seniors won't be back. When I started all of this, I thought that four years was the marathon of education, long compared sprinting of camp ministry and even the middle distance terms of student leadership in college. Four years is ages to teach someone, I thought back then. It's true: four years is long enough to know someone well, to recognize handwriting and read expressions as clearly as words. But it's just a moment, really, from the Day One to this day, one of the last.

And we're carrying bouquets back to the car, reflecting on the night. Did they like it? Will they remember it? I know I will.