Today was sort of a complicated day. We had an elaborate staged scene for cameras just before lunch today so that we could get the ninth graders waving good-bye to all the lower grades. We had the same ninth graders debrief from yesterday’s Physics Day at Lake Compounce in Bristol, CT (Turns out that they run a pretty good physics day using their rides and the speeds of said rides as physics problems). Between those two events my two main classes of the day were shorter by 20 minutes each.
I had my four regular tutoring periods, though, and those went OK. One girl is working on transformations of English vocabulary (nouns to verbs to adjectives to adverbs) and sentence construction. One is working on reading aloud, at speed, with meaning and context. One worked on his book report, and one was writing an essay for a prize contest. A fairly typical cross section of activities there.
The hardest part was sending out an email to my colleagues, saying that I’m leaving at the end of the year. The next two Sundays will be my last days of preaching, and the day after tomorrow is my last day of officiating at Sunday chapel. I won’t have chaplaincy responsibilities at my next school, either, so this is the end of one part of my life, in a way. And almost instantly, I had about a dozen e-mails from colleagues, saying that they were sorry I was going … good luck… good for you… congrats on the new job… farewell. A lot of people sent me a quick email, and several more came to find me in person.
So it was strange layers of good-bye, and hello, all at the same time.
