Week Thirty-Eight: May 24th

And now we come to the final week: the final week of the school year, the final week of my weekly beard experiments and the final week of this blog. Thirty-eight weeks and thirty-eight beards does a school year make.

In response to last week's "Question" (especially in response to those wondering about my possible move to teach Second Grade next year) comes "The Answer!" It is a bit strange walking the halls of any place--a school, a store, one's own house--sporting a number two scrawled from the ever-changing facial hair around one's mouth.

Perhaps because they were watching the clock and counting the days, minutes and moments until summer, my students did not seem phased by the giant two on my chin. That didn't stop me from having them grab armloads of books and boxes to help me cart them across the school, up a few flights of stairs and past several classrooms also in the latter stages of closing down, to deposit them in my new Second Grade classroom. My Fourth Graders, some of whom are nearly as tall as me--which isn't saying much, really--could not get over the diminutive size of the kids, the chairs and the desks. They felt like twenty Gullivers in a foreign land, even if some of them are not much taller than the current crop of ascending-Second Graders.

In the end, they might actually suspect this to be the reason for my move: so I will most assuredly be taller than all the kids in next year's class. While I do have height-challenged issues, I no longer make decisions based on them. I rarely notice when my former students return to visit me (even as soon as 5th/6th Grade) and already tower over me. When they reach high school and I am only up to their shoulders they shake their heads, wondering how I ever appeared a giant to them. As do I, as do I.