This morning I saw my classroom. It feels a little bit like meeting a new roommate or a sibling's fiance. Although the place is new and unfamiliar, I am keenly aware that it will soon occupy an integral part of my life and thoughts. I stood there, trying to imagine how I would feel about the place a month from now, two months from now, six, a year. I imagine the expanse of freshly shampooed carpet filled with desks, the cupboards filled with my books and supplies, and the desks filled with students--shadowy forms now, but they'll soon have faces and goofy haircuts all their own. It was a little bit like writing the first entry in a brand new diary: The pages seem to house the spectres of the lines that will be written; It was a little bit like standing on an empty stage in front of an empty hall: The audience, props, lights, and excitement are almost tangible, depsite the black blankness of the stage. My classroom. Try saying it a few times to get the feel of it. My classroom. MY classroom. my classroom... My Classroom. It will soon give birth to lots of other Mys: My books, My desks, My computer, My bulletin board, My rules, My expectations, My problems, My test scores, My students...My students.
I'm headed off to Germany with a bookbag empty of homework and a head full of questions. I am a vacuum ready to absorb and combine and unify. Normally when I go on vacation I am full. Full of books, full of information to squeeze in and process in whatever corner of mental space I can find, and full of things I ought to be doing. But for the first time in a while, Tomorrow has a captial T for me. It's not a common noun, an ordinary thing already pre-planned and pre-filled and pre-ceded by days just like it. It's a proper noun, a title, a place, a state of being, a day that doesn't follow the basic pattern the majority of my days have followed for my four years at college. Tomorrow I go to Europe, and when I come back I start getting aquainted with my classroom. I'll ask it all of my questions and see what it says.
What I'm trying to say is that things are changing. My life and its basic pattern is adjusting drastically. I've been a student for eighteen years, ninteen counting preschool. I haven't not been a student since I was three years old. Now, connecting with the experienced non-student me (my inner three-year-old), I'm taking unsteady steps again, figuring things out again, making it up as I go again. I've got a lot riding on my inner toddler, but do you know what the nice thing about toddlers is? They're practically unbreakable. They can roll down the stairs, fall out of moving vehicles, scrape knees, skin elbows, get dirty, make messes, cry hard, and bounce back up to keep living. So now that it's finally time to be an adult, I'm going to fully release my inner child, catch it up quickly on everything of importance I've learned since I chained it to a desk, and let it play in a classroom of its own. Based on all of this, adulthood is only, afterall, childsplay.
