Ever Fantasize About Your Last Day of Teaching?

Mine included one final rebellion, a hot gay fantasy, and a narrow escape.

In commemoration of another trip around this sun, this post is a reflection of the best gift I ever gave myself.

Mug shots and staff portraits look way too similar.

Petty, Little Rebellion

I didn’t need to attend the training in the school library on the last day of school because I wasn’t returning the following year.

I slipped out of the meeting/morning potluck and returned to my classroom to sit at my big ol’ teacher desk to wait for the final bell to ring which would mark the last six hours of my career.

The desk was exactly the type of desk I always imagined I wanted before I was an actual teacher. These heavy, wooden desks were so necessary to my idea of being a professional educator. They came off as prodigious and authoritative as a boulder in a field meant for a prophet to stand upon. I would search the school high and low for these pieces of furniture if my classroom didn’t come with one.

But then over the years these hulking, wide pieces of industrial wood became onerous to me, unnecessarily eating up too much floor space. They were, literally, too “old school.”

This one last desk, in Room 2, I retained because what if the next teacher wanted it? I didn’t want to be presumptuous about discarding it.

As soon as I sat back down at my desk after fleeing the last training, I started emptying the drawers, wiping them clean of paperclips, staples, and dust.

I had one last little rebellion planned (I was a troublemaker my entire career).

I had refused to administer the final reading and math assessments for unit six (nerd-scandalous, I know).

I chose not assess my students. Although, I pretended like I had. In the chaos and hubbub of the end of a school year, teachers are in a tizzy attempting to complete a mountain of obligatory paperwork— cumulative records, report cards, assessments, IEPs. I pretended to be in a similar frenzy as everyone else like some melodramatic actress part of a cast of hysterics.

However months before, I decided that I wasn’t going to even bother administering the last round of assessments. I was burned out and quitting. I felt zero allegiance to indulging in the drudgery of completing the final round of tests. We kindergarten teachers were supposed to administer the assessments, grade them, tabulate and input the scores into an Excel spreadsheet, and then submit this spreadsheet to administrators so they could later do a grade-level data analysis. Ha, yeah right.

It was the full industrial-educational-complex numbers factory in full effect, but I was going to be dissenting.

Earlier in my career, when I was full of youthful vim and vexations, I would gnash my terrible teeth and show my terrible claws at such mandated irrelevancies. I would throw temper tantrums and engage in loud protestations to my own detriment, but this time I opted for quiet discretion. I had a renewed sense of clarity and an unwillingness to loudly complicate my exit.

After I cleaned out the teacher desk I had always coveted, I inserted the pile of un-completed assessments inside the top front drawer like some Dear John letter to be discovered by a spurned lover hours after my departure.

Then I sat back in my chair at my big ‘ol teacher desk and took in the remaining sunlight still illuminating my classroom as the sun continued to move westward in the sky. I watched the pretty little dust motes float in front of me. I realized then that many of our working lives come to an end in quiet little whimpers.

Of course, they do.

HOT GAY FANTASY

Years before, when I was at a different school, I witnessed the end of another teacher’s working life.

Third grade teacher Mr. Farina, an older gay Italian man, was retiring. Our staff’s end-of-year luncheon was being held in the auditorium and the teachers had pitched in to hire a taco man (it’s an LA teacher thing). Once the faculty ate, there were some announcements and then a moment to recognize Mr. Farina’s last day.

He was made to get up and speak. A funny, smart aleck, curmudgeon of a man, he thanked everybody and then as soon as he started to say, “I remember my first day walking onto this campus thirty-five years ago…” he became overwhelmed by tears. He cut himself off and sat back down as his colleagues wished him well, offering hugs, and pats on the back. I held my farewell back, figuring I would catch him later because I still needed some paperwork from him. I was a little surprised by his burst of vulnerability, as I think he was too.

Later, as the school day was drawing to a close, I went to catch him in his upstairs classroom. The room had been stripped bare of color, adornment, rules, and posters, all the vitality of learning ripped off like wrapping paper from a birthday gift. The learning space had been cleaned and was ready for the custodians to take the opportunity that summer to do their semi-annual deep cleaning.

There was a piano in his room that had sat mute for years. Mr. Farina once reminisced to me about how he used to play the piano and sing with his students daily. But he had stopped doing that years ago because teaching had shifted so radically to a standards-based focus on regimented curriculums along with copious amounts of testing. There was no more time for singing in the classroom. The piano now just took up space. It too was as “old-school” as those big ol’ desks.

I found Mr. Farina sitting in his teacher chair at his teacher desk, slumped over, sleeping, an offering of cookies and cupcakes in a paper plate before him. He had dozed off waiting for the final minutes of his thirty-five-year career to end. His head of white hair moved in dreaming little jerks.

I entered, then exited, and then re-entered again, making more noise the second time around so I could wake him. I apologized to him as he awoke. “Mr. Farina, I wanted to tell you how I enjoyed working with you. I wish you well. Come back and visit. Enjoy your retirement.” He thanked me for the words.

Then as I was about to leave him, he said, “Can I tell you something?”

I stopped, “Yes, of course.”

“I think you and that one TA would make a good couple,” he said.

I’m sure I blushed. There was a young, hunky TA that I had a secret infatuation with. He was so beautiful and strong it was hard to both look at him and look away. I hadn’t confessed this crush to anybody, most certainly not anybody at work. I felt caught red-handed but also thrilled that Mr. Farina had imagined as much, if not more, than I had ever did about that boy.

Mr. Farina and I had never connected on that level before, but I appreciated his sudden candor. There was a long, hateful history we both shared of people trying to prevent men like us from holding jobs as teachers.

Fuck you, Antonin Scalia. Fuck you, John Briggs. Fuck you, Anita Bryant.

His comment was a random but lovely thing for him to say to me as he was departing. It made me think that the notion that the world is actually some dream of a snoozing old man might actually be a better world than the one we have at hand.

The Escape

Now, it was my turn to sit at my own teacher desk, just like Mr. Farina had years before, and wait for my final quitting time.

Instead of sleeping, I was going to pass the hours by reading a novel I had brought from home.

But then thinking of Mr. Farina’s alternate universe where someone I lusted after actually reciprocated, I thought what if I was the type of person who actually pursued what I wanted and didn’t wait around for the minutes to pass on the clock?

I questioned, if I was a free human being, where would I be right now? Would it be at this too-big desk plotting petty little rebellions? If I had the freedom to do what I wanted to do with my time what would I be doing? Where would I place myself?

The answer was, definitely, not here. Not anymore. I don’t want to be here anymore.

I remember once wanting to come to work, wanting to work so bad I spent my days trying to get this very job and my weekends planning my lessons. I spent vacations collecting realia from the world to bring to my students. But that longing to teach had ended.

The will, the drive to teach had been driven out of me. I was depleted, but I was also a free human being. I didn’t need to bring a novel to pass the time away as if my life is some interminable waiting room. My time was a suddenly, newly regenerated currency available to me right in this very moment. There was no need to throw coins into a wishing well anymore, it was time to spend them.

Leave. Now. I considered. I thought of Go, Dog, Go! A Book of Things That Go by P.D. Eastman. It was a book I had read many, many times to the kindergarteners.

Don’t wait around for the stupid luncheon where the staff will offer you an obligatory farewell card and a gift certificate that will amount to something less than the value of what you contributed for the taco man. You’re not beholden to anyone anymore.

Go, Mr. Villegas, go.

And then with the excitement of a made decision, I gathered my laptop, my novel, my jacket, a bag of odds and ends, and marched to the main office. I handed in my classroom and gate keys. I bid farewell and good luck to the lovely, helpful school secretaries. I told the head secretary that I was signing out, “Please, use any of my left over illness time.” I told her I’d mail in my doctor’s note because I’m not coming back to this place and I’m definitely not attending that scheduled meeting with the principal after school. The one meant to address complaints about how I handled the discipline of a student.

I jumped into my car and I drove away. I fled west, toward the Pacific Ocean, that immense blue expanse that is a metaphor for all the abundance that is in the world. I drove to Santa Monica, where I had once lived for ten years. I went to Shutters on the Beach, a luxury hotel whose location is in its name. I parked on the street and entered their lobby café. I took a seat on the empty patio overlooking the Pacific Ocean at 9:30 on a weekday morning like I was some vacationing celebrity who could afford such morning-time beach vistas. I noticed how much cooler the climate was at the coast than inland. I ordered a coffee and a meal.

From where I sat, close to the California coastline, nearly everything was now east of me. I had re-centered myself, draw a new meridian in my life, everywhere was now home for me, everything was east of me, even Hollywood, the Westside, the Eastside, East LA, the suburbs, the deserts, the US, the world. It was still morning and I had beat the sun on its chariot ride toward the beach. I beat the sunset.

What to do? What to do next?

I took out my laptop and, no longer a teacher, I did what all writers do, I began to write.