It's significant, but also kind of calm because my favorite students aren't here (they graduated yesterday), and because we're all in a new office. There's a huge building behind the main school and all us 3rd-grade teachers are now ensconced on the second floor of it. it's biiiiig, it's new and mostly-clean, but it also has no sink, no water fountain, boxes of random stuff lying everywhere willy-nilly, and no coffee pot set up yet.
In other words, it's a beginning. This will be our nest for 2015, but we haven't straightened it out yet.
B-Teacher is leaving soon, KBR is leaving, YSR is leaving, and JY is getting to move from being a homeroom teacher to just a subject teacher and leader of the special Saturday program, so that's infinitely better for her. Less work, less stress.
I'm lucky that I'll still have JY and SY in my office. Next year there will be THIRTEEN 3rd-grade homerooms instead of ten, so our office won't just get three new teachers to replace the leaving ones--we'll get six. New friends! Or acquaintances! Whatever they are, I'll be glad to see them.
Yesterday, I held it together at graduation. I enjoyed their ceremony and didn't cry at all. That is, until I saw BH.
BH is my boy. Of the three 3rd graders I love most--him, BY and HH, he was the one who helped me through my first horrible afterschool. He came by after graduation and took a picture with me.
I told his mom what an amazing person he was, then when she went away I told him I'd miss him. Then i couldn't help it...the tears began to well up. I turned away, sure that a teenage boy would definitely not want to be witness to his teacher falling into a puddle of tears.
I kept trying to sniff and tilt my head back and do every trick I knew of to keep the tears from falling, but they started anyway. BH said, "Are you crying?" and turned me around so he could hug me. I just cried on him for a few seconds, then I told him why he was so special. I said, "I just remember how kind you've always been and how much you helped me with our first afterschool. I could always count on you and I really appreciate you."
He got just slightly misty-eyed himself when I told him how proud I was of him, how he'd grown up to be so handsome and smart. He said I was lovely too and that he'd be sure to visit. I truly think he will. After 18 months of knowing this amazing boy, all I can say is, it was worth coming all the way to Korea just to meet this one, the one who wrote me a letter in perfect English during my first week of school in August 2013.
Anyhoodle, not only did I cry over BH yesterday, I have cried every time I have mentioned BH to anybody. Seriously, I wept buckets just describing the scene over the phone to my mother. Cried this morning while telling SY about it. I may just have to resign myself to crying over BH's wonderfulness for the rest of my tenure at theis middle school.
But that would be okay, too. He's one of many people I know who are worth the tears.
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