We sat in the audience, spellbound for nearly 45 minutes as the stage came alive with the storytelling of theater.
Springtime is high school musical season, and our sixth-graders — along with students from the other elementary schools in our district — were invited to attend a preview of the annual production at the high school.
It was a chance for our sixth-graders to get an unstressed glance at the regional middle/high school environment, and to experience some of the possibilities of extracurricular activities, like the musical play that unfolded before their eyes.
In this case, the production was “Into the Woods,” an intricate musical take on Grimm’s Fairy Tales, with interlocking storylines and weaving songs.
There, in the audience, I played detective.
I spent much of my time paying close attention to the performers. Many of them were my former students, now years away from the days when they sat in my classroom, writing stories and essays and reading novels and texts. I didn’t immediately recognize everyone.
For some, like the high school seniors on stage, those six years since they were with me must seem like a lifetime ago. For me, the recognition comes slowly, and then suddenly, bringing back memories, as I parse through the nearly-adult voices and grown-up looks of those on stages to find the kids they once were.
Sometimes, it takes a movement, or a facial expression, or a tone of voice for the rush of memory to arrive.
Then, I’ll see them, again, as they once were.
In just a few weeks, in a fairly recent tradition, all of the graduating high school seniors from Hampshire Regional who attended our school will return, in full dress and gown, and all of us in the school will come into the hallway as a way to congratulate them and with them success in the years ahead.
I’ll be detective again, looking at faces, remembering them as younger versions of themselves, searching for the spark of personality in the grown-up version before us.
These experiences have me not just steeped in nostalgia — for that just seems to hint at regret that the time has passed, which is not the truth of the situation at all. Instead, the experience sparks pride in the students — up on the stage and lit up with lights, or those walking our hallways as graduating seniors — and in us, all of us, as teachers, who spend our years with classrooms of young people in hopes that what we do in the time while they are with us makes a difference.
I’m not suggesting that any one of us, alone, is the catalyst for what is to come. No teacher ever acts alone. Nor parents. Nor the larger community. What we do in our profession as educators is collaborative in ways we don’t often acknowledge nearly enough.
The students I have in front of me now, this year, have been loved, supported, nurtured and pushed by those colleagues in the grades behind me, just as the students in the grades beyond me — like those who were up on the stage and who will be walking our hallways — have some part of us traveling forward with them.
Or so one hopes.
Think of the teachers who made an impact on your own life. Think of how those echoes reverberate in the essence of who you are. I remember my own sixth-grade teacher, as clear as day, for his creative energy and enthusiasm.
I remember the high school teacher who finally showed me poetry that struck a nerve, although I didn’t admit it at the time and only let it surface later, as an adult, as I was becoming a songwriter. I remember the college professor who turned to me one day and said, “Some day you will be a teacher,” and how I laughed at that as I told him about my plans to write for newspapers and magazines. (Maybe we were both right.)
At this time of year, in our school district, we start planning, thinking, and having meetings about transitions for our students moving out of elementary school and into middle school. For some students, it’s a short leap. They’re ready to move on. For others, it’s a source of concern, about leaving the known for the unknown.
We, as teachers, know that most of them will be ready for the lights of the next stage, as we cheer them on with applause from our seats in the auditorium.
Kevin Hodgson teaches sixth grade at the William E. Norris Elementary School and is the co-director of outreach with the Western Massachusetts Writing Project.