apairofloons

I have never left high school. Oh, there was a brief period when I was in college, but I went right back to high school, this time as a teacher.   My reflections of high school life, the awkward moments, boring classes, gym suits and homework, have happily blurred and left the more vivid memories of fun, friends, and lots of fooling around. I have retired from teaching, but I remember the faces of my former students and how I tried to see myself in one of them. Where was that girl with braces, long bangs, and a short paisley mini-skirt? In today’s teenage lexis, which kind of girl was she? Was she the girl wearing bright green flip flops, a cotton skirt, and long swingy hair, or was she the girl in all black with safety pins strategically placed up her long black sleeves, or was she perhaps the girl asking to go to the bathroom, with a pack of smokes peeking out of a tiny purse, who may not come back to class? Working in a high school as an adult is a vivid reminder of my teenage life and the time spent in high school.

I have a special fondness for the 20 years I spent at Oak Park and River Forest High School but I know in my heart I can’t go back at least not to that same time, it is gone. Or will reappear like Brigadoon? We did have a magical time, an art department of 5 talented colleagues, and a beautiful school within which to work. There was a potter, a photographer, a jeweler, a printmaker, a painter and a muralist. These were the people I worked with and we considered our teaching a part of our art making, we were better together, it was our gestalt.

Across this large school building were 200 teachers who each had a specialty and were experts in their field. I felt that lunch in the faculty dining room could have been a meeting of the minds. Often lofty discussions, but equal parts jokes, politics and the tedium of a large bureaucracy. We could cling to each other when the harsh winds of adolescence blew and also celebrate together, for we saw in each student a life of possibility.

If I wanted to teach about color from a scientific perspective I could seek out one of many science teachers. I loved to see what books English teachers had chosen for their class and longed to study James Joyce along with them. I admired the math teacher who instilled a love of numbers in his students and the P.E teacher who taught girls self-defense and modeled for the young women and men in our school that they had the power to be themselves and to speak out. Philosophy, Spoken Word, Shakespeare, Economics, Clothing Construction, TV Production and Metalsmithing were just some of the many classes that were offered to our students. Have I romanticized my time as teacher? Perhaps, but not that time, and not those people.

Arched windows frame prairie style rooftops

Blonde wood floors that make shoes sound special

stepping carefully around and through people’s lives

movement, teeming halls, the f- bomb

Then suddenly quiet shiny floors and silence.

Doors fling open spilling ideas into space

Beats drip from headphones

Backpacks split open at the seams

Click, lock, slam, go.