There is no overtime period for learning at the end of a school year. When we reach the last day of the school year, instructed learning stops. The calendar for teaching and learning expires. Mr. Mixdorf told our ninth grade World History class in 1962, “I can only teach what time allows. Perhaps you will learn more in some future course or on your own. Perhaps not.”
As a stray thought, the end of a school year is the closing of a door. In lit class, the last chapters will not be read and we are left to wonder if the heroine will survive. The beginnings of a ceramic piece are pulled from the wheel and returned to the clay storage bin. Some students will never touch clay again. The Bunsen burner is turned off and the lab equipment reshelved. For most, there is only one high school chem class. And, in Mr. Mixdorf’s class, we were left pondering if the United States will follow the patterns of the Greek, Roman, and British empires; the rise and fall thereof.
These bits and pieces of curriculum and learning lie like single socks without their mates. They will remain incomplete until a match can be made and the mental imagining of the heroine’s plight is resolved, the intricate shaping of new clay will finally grow on the wheel, and the smell and color of heated chemicals will prove the lab hypothesis. Or, perhaps not. For many students, incomplete curriculum, like the unmatched sock, goes into a basket in the back of the mental closet until it is forgotten under the subsequent layering of life’s detritus. So, on the last day of school, the school year ends.
However, Mr. Mixdorf’s “perhaps” lingers with possibility and doors of learning are left slightly ajar. Possibilities do rise next school year and some time in high school or college. Unexpected door re-openings exist on the job or in the variety of jobs most people work during a lifetime. Somewhere and sometime an unmatched sock reappears and life’s experience kindles an interest to explore your “perhaps” moments of incomplete learning. Thank you, Mr. M, for leaving learning doors ajar. The rise and fall of empires is unfolding before our eyes and I would not be considering the historical context without you.
ps: Every teacher from the past exists forever just behind doors ajar. They are unchanged by time. Last week, I read Mr. Rosenberg’s obit. Every word I read was in his distinct voice, spoken with his distinct smile and sincerity, and what he taught is unchanged even in death. They are with us whenever we choose to peek into the bends and turns of our past.