August—a month of Sundays

One of my friends employed in psychotherapy told me once her schedule is full in August of teachers experiencing the stress of returning to the classroom.

“The teacher dream” is a common August night time experience. In the teacher dream the teacher cannot find the classroom assigned, has car trouble or other obstacles preventing arrival, misplaced papers, keys, clothes. Rarely are their kids in the teacher dream, the stress is about the place and the adults who labor within it.

The teachers at year-round schools probably avoid the angst of August—where traditional schedule school teachers slowly repack, purchase and prepare, and open their classrooms to a familiar odor combination of humidity and dust. The hastily prepared vacation into the always hot and the always disappointing is over. The shorts and tees make way for the teacher-appropriate work attire. The dread of the wake-up time takes over from the idle to-do list and the quiet time reading.

The end of summer, like the onset of fall’s coolness, is teacher contemplative time. The teacher stares at a class list with names polysyllabic and unusual. The ones from the school year past are already difficult to recall. Who might these new children be? Some may be dear, others button-pushers with prescient knowledge of weak moments and sense of self-doubt.

The school mail room is filled with the aimless memos and self-important must-do’s written by those who long learned the appearance of order is better than actual order itself. The business of school—not the perception of schooling from the prism of the business world—but the actual business of opening and welcoming is an enterprise veteran teachers know and enter with a combination  of energy just mildly tinged with anxiety.

In the poem “Idea of Order at Key West,” the persona created by Wallace Stevens walks the beach with a friend, struck by the sound of a woman singing by the sea. Her words are seen as superior to the sound of the waves—human thought forming sound and by that sound influencing others. “Whose spirit is this?” the beachcomber in the poem wonders. Teachers know whose spirit it is, and they like returning sparrows reengage in it each August.