Salmon and Souvlaki

Last Wednesday, June 11, 2008, I had to say good bye to my school.  It was sad.  I had spent the week before packing, while my kids worked on projects.

All I can say it, thank heavens for projects.  I would have spent many late nights at school if I’d had to be actively teaching for the last week of school.  Instead, my reading class made projects illustrating scenes from the book, Charlie’s Raven, by Jean Craighead George, which we read as a class.  (I highly recommend that book by the way.  It’s wonderful.  And fun to read aloud).  And my Writing classes wrote autobiographies.  They came up with some really neat projects.  Anyway, Tuesday morning, my classroom looked like this:

Empty, and not mine.

(By Wednesday, it was filled with another teacher’s stuff and so I didn’t really have the satisfaction of leaving an entirely clean and empty room.  But that’s OK.)  It was almost unbearably hot the last three days of school.  We were supposed to have a full day on Monday but it got shortened to a half day because it was 90 by like 10:00 am.  We had the ESOL picnic on Monday morning.  I have lots of fun pictures to share but don’t think I should put them on the web for all to see.  So, family, I’m going to e-mail you the link to them (it’s unlisted) and any other loyal reader, if you want to e-mail me, I’ll send you the link to them too!

Monday afternoon was the faculty end of the year party, at which the staff gave me some beautiful earrings and I was reminded how blessed I was to be able to work at such a fabulous school.  As I told them that day, it was a wonderful place to teach and to learn how to be a good teacher.  I will miss them a lot.  Some perhaps not as much as others, but I think that’s the way it goes in life!

By Wednesday, my room was basically done.  I had lots of nice goodbye wishes from my kids, including all over my chalkboards.

I was doing fine until, about an hour after we had sent the kids off with hugs, almost tears, and smiles on everyone’s faces, I walked outside to see that a bus had come back to school and all the kids were still on it.  It was Bus 221, the bus that had all the Russian/Hispanic fights last year.  Mostly, it had calmed down this year but on the last day of school, they’d lost control.  So the bus drive brought them back.  The kids called me onto the bus and I saw a mess EVERYWHERE.  It looked like they’d taken bags of chips, crushed them, and thrown them all over the bus.  It was awful.  And one sweet little girl, O, from Israel was sobbing.  So I called her over and found out that she was supposed to have been home in time to tell her aunt and uncle goodbye before they left for the airport to fly back to Israel and because of those ridiculous kids, she had missed them.  So I went back inside, saw one of my fellow ESOL teachers and starting crying, going on and on about the bus and poor O and everything.  Christy was looking at me like, “It’s OK.  It’s only the bus.”  That’s when I said that I probably could have handled it on any other day but really, I was crying about leaving instead.  So anyway, I did leave school in tears but my good friend Tara from school walked me out to my car, and was very kind to me.  And Wednesday night, all seven of us teachers (and most of the spouses) had dinner together.  We sat on the deck and laughed and talked and ate and ate.  It was a wonderful way to end my three years with them.  My department chair wrote in my card, “Keep in touch.  I want to hold your babies!”  I want her to hold them too, when they come, Lord willing.  But that was what almost got me started crying again!  I managed not to though.  Christy told me I couldn’t because then she would start crying too!  And so, my three years there are over.  I am really sad to leave but am still trusting that the Lord is sending me to my new school for a purpose.

Nik and I took all of my stuff down to my new school Thursday afternoon.  It was very hot outside but the school is air-conditioned!! So that’s definitely a blessing, something my old school does not have!  And, we also discovered that my new school is only about 2 miles from Prima Foods, our local supplier of all foods Greek.  So Nik and I will now be able to easily have as much pita, olives, and feta as we want or need!  See, I’m finding positives already!