Day -3: When Overwhelmed ... Sort Fraction Circles!

This leaving thing is so surreal. I can't get my head around the fact that three days from now I won't really be a teacher anymore. Perhaps I will still be a teacher in an abstract sense, and I will still be a teacher in the minds of my former students, but I won't be a current teacher at my school, thinking about the next school year.

I have been so overwhelmed by the idea of leaving that I have accomplished next to nothing in moving out or saying goodbye. Even the usual end-of-the-year projects I normally do - burning CDs for my students of songs we learned, writing awards for each student, filing papers in students' cumes (their folders that follow them from one grade to the next) - I have been unable to complete. Mostly, I've just been hanging out with people after school, spending time chatting with a student, the teacher across the hall, the custodian. I guess I can cast that as part of my leave-taking project; I'm appreciating the people around me and enjoying the time I have with them. It feels a little like that while I'm doing it, and it feels a lot like procrastination.

My friend (the teacher across the hall) was laughing at me yesterday because I accidentally flung my pen across the room, and I spent like 20 minutes crawling around on the floor looking for it, as opposed to doing all the millions of other things I should have been doing. But I needed that pen! It was the last ballpoint pen in my classroom! That task was immediately in front of me, so I could handle it. But I never found the pen.

Today, here's how I decided to spend my time after school: sitting on the floor with two students, resorting fraction circles into little plastic bags. You can imagine fraction circles, I'm sure. They are plastic discs, divided into fractional pieces. Each set has a whole, 2 halves, 3 thirds, 4 fourths, etc. These fraction circles are very useful for teaching students about equivalent fractions. But they'd gotten all mixed up over the years, so one set might have 8 fourths but no fifths. I decided to have two students empty out all 16 bags of fractions circles and resort the hundreds of pieces into complete sets. This was important, really it was! What would next year's teacher do if I left her with mixed-up fraction circle sets?

I sat there with my students, meticulously counting out eighths and tenths and twelfths while we talked about their families and their summer plans and their soccer team. They loved their monotonous task. "It's like a puzzle," Eddie said.

That hanging-out/procrastination time has been the best part of my days lately, just being in my classroom while that steady stream of people - current students, former students, other teachers - come through to visit me, the teacher-me. What will it be like when that teacher-me identity is gone, when no one can come visit it in my classroom?