Anticipating the Separation Anxiety

There are two weeks left. Two tiny, eensy, infinitesimal weeks left before the spring semester is over. There is a part of me that is saying yesss and halleluiah and bring me a mojito! but that part is seriously being dwarfed by the fact that in two weeks I will no longer take the elevator up to the top floor of the English building and walk into the room that's made of windows-windows-windows to see the beaming faces of all my best and favorite boys.

There are ten best and favorite boys (and, actually, one girl). They are engineering students. They are going to grow up to build important things. They are going to keep our world turning. But before they do that, they are going to make it through two sections of English Composition (regular and advanced) and they are going to do it with me. They enjoyed my class so much last semester that they swarmed my open sections for this semester and, even though they hate writing and English, and even though they think it's terribly pointless for boys like themselves, they have spent the last thirteen weeks of class (and the fifteen weeks of fall semester, too) listening to me, getting better, trying to impress me, tossing papers at me with confidence. "That's the best paper I've ever written," they'll say, or, "You're going to love this." And they're right. It is and I do. They are trying so hard, and I love them for it.

These best boys have done a lot of things for me. They've brought me peanut butter pie, Oreos, and ice cream. They've written me notes of love. They've even gone so far as to orchestrate it so their laptops blast bass-thumping arena rock-type songs when I enter the classroom, which makes me feel like I'm some sort of badass superhero teacher.

It's things like this that make me adore them, and I adore them in a way that is unyielding, hard, unshakable. Part of me wants to scoop them all up and move them into my basement so that they are available whenever I get the itch to be amused. Part of me wants to tell them that when they've all successfully turned twenty-one, I am going to take them to the bar and buy them rounds and rounds of shots. Part of me just wants to stop time so I can go on with them in my class forever.

After this semester, they are done with English. They will have successfully killed their general education requirements, and they will be off to save the world with their chemical-mechanical-aerospace engineering skills. I will miss them terribly. So, so terribly.

I'm dreading the last day. I'm dreading the handing out of cookies (they asked, they begged, they looked at me with big big big eyes and said, Can't you make us cookies again? Like last semester? They were soooo good.) and the inevitable goodbye, which is going to be as difficult as saying goodbye to my first-ever class. It will be so much the same. It will be me looking at these boys--my best, best boys--and thinking, You have changed me, you have made me a better teacher, you have taught me about myself. I will never be the same again.

And it will be completely true.