After all the children have left school on the last day, close your eyes, smile, and hug yourself. You deserve the moment. Few outside the profession understand the emotionality of the end of a school year. Don’t explain yourself, just make your private celebration. Puff your chest, professional educator, and do your personal victory dance in the end zone of the school year. Job well done!
Media makes a big deal of showcasing college football each Saturday in the fall of the year. There is hoopla and fanfare, banners and cheers, and pumped-up excitement. In all honesty, I say to Kirk Herbstreit and Lee Corso, television’s game day impresarios, “welcome to a teacher’s world 180 days of the year”, only without anyone watching. From the first day of school to the last, each instructional day of the school year is “game day” because when a teacher walks into a classroom it is like the Wisconsin Badgers entering Camp Randall Stadium. Children expect their teacher to show up with a game buster of a lesson plan every day of school. They expect a teacher to excite their learning, make each child feel like an academic winner, and, in the evening of the day, every supper table awaits a child’s retelling of the glory of their school today. When that happens, and it happens all the time for a professional teacher, school really is “game day” and the teacher is the star of game day.
“Huh?”, Herbstreit and Corso may say. “Where is the action and glory and jubilation of scoring winning touchdowns?”. Non-educators don’t understand. All that glory and more is in the face of each child when their “I get it” light is switched on. It is in the sound of every perfect note played or sung in a music room, each perfect geometry proof flashed on a smartboard, every concise five paragraph essay, and every perfect angle cut on a band saw in the shop. And it reverberates when an “I got it” child tackles a next challenge. Their success begets their new successes and that is the glory of game day at school.
I encourage professional educators to celebrate the close of a school year and honor all the winning achieved by children under their instruction and direction. In The Natural, Roy Hobbs dreams of walking down the street and hearing people whisper, “There goes Roy Hobbs, the best there ever was in this game”. For the next several decades, whenever the children you taught gather in their class reunions, you will be their Roy Hobbs. In their hearts and retold stories, they know who made a difference in their lives. Celebrate your year of game days. Smile and dance with the knowledge that all your children know – you earned the celebration.