Every time I pack up my classroom at the end of the year is time travel.
I’ve done this before!
I’ve sorted and packed and thrown things away.
I’ve unmade the organization to make way for cleaning and waxing.
Over and over and over again.

I wish I remembered my first year pack-up.
I wasn’t sure if I would have a job the next school year, so I probably packed up while crying.

The year I had my daughter was emotional too. I was packing up to take a year off with her. There’s a picture, well a still from a video, of 9-months pregnant me walking down the hallway. I’m leaving my classroom and my friends Kris and Mardi are talking to me, or my stomach.

Other years go by in a dusty blur, melting together. Some of the details are different of course, the rules are slightly different at different schools and different times. Some years we had to take everything off of every wall so they could paint. We used to have to cover all the bookshelves with roll paper. Was this for dust? I don’t know.

There’s the figuring out where to put the things for the summer, deciding what things I should take home to work on over the summer….and of course, the eventual shoving of things into cabinets. Then I have to remember to label everything with my room number.

Every year there’s a conversation with the head custodian, wondering about the room cleaning schedule… so that I know when I can come back in to set it all up again.