Comings and Goings

I have always looked forward to spring, and the end of the school year. All winter, when I was a high school teacher, I would count down the days until I was done teaching.

Then, spring would come and the school year would start to wind down and teaching would be less stressful. In the last few weeks, I would give a final and then basically come to work to baby sit. About this point, I would spend some time with my students, relaxing and I would realize that they were much cooler than they had acted all year. Some of this is because math brings out the worst in many people and some is just how rapidly adolescence mature, huge personality growth over a single year. So, even though I was happy to have a vacation, I would suddenly realize that I would miss these kids.

Now that I am tutoring privately and working with mentally ill young adults, I have found my interactions with my students/clients to be much more enjoyable. It turns out that while I love math I don't really love disciplining large classes of kids. I haven't been counting down the days; I've just been enjoying my job.

Today one of the residents at the co-op moved on to a fancier residential program. He barely spoke to me over the three weeks he came to my yoga and art classes. He was very nice and polite when he did talk, he just seemed to be in a cloud of medications. Once, he asked me to take him to lunch because he couldn't leave campus without staff. We had a nice lunch at Kraftsmen. Again, he didn't say much.

He came up to me today to say goodbye. He thanked me for taking him to lunch that one time. On man! That hit me a lot harder than I would have thought. It was so touching, this expression of gratitude and affection from someone who doesn't interact very openly. I'm going to miss him.

Then, I learned that one of my favorite tutorees has decided that she is doing very well in math and doesn't need any more help. She is right, and I'm surprised that she continued to be tutored for as long as she did. She is a bright girl who caught up very fast. But stilll, I am really going to miss her. She is a neat kid that I spent two hours a week with for the past few months.

One of the meditations that I do calls out to the, like, eight names of god. It starts out with The Creater, The Destroyer... It isn't in English and I have forgotten the rest. It took me a while to embrace "the destroyer." But it was explained to me that we need to destroy old patterns to make next ones. You need to leave the past to enter the future.

As I say goodbye to people I like, and will probably see again, I'm a little sad. In the movie Stand by Me, there is a quote at the end that, "friends come in and out of our lives like little slips of paper."