Teachers' dirty looks

Everyone’s got their own idea of what truly constitutes the end of summer. There’s an official date, of course, but nobody really goes by that; usually it’s Labor Day that people have in mind, or the day they change out of their palm-tree-speckled Bermuda shorts and into their boring ol’ khakis, ready for a good stiff breeze and the first golden leaf.

For me, it’s the day I get stuck behind a school bus making 12 stops in a four-block stretch. When I see a backpack crossing the street with a tiny person attached to it, I know autumn has arrived.

It’s a bittersweet moment. Fall has become my favorite stretch of the year, but that wasn’t always the case, precisely because I was once that tiny person. School was fine once you got settled in and established a rhythm, but it’s that initial breaking-in period that’s cause for dread in the days leading up to the first bell. You toss and turn at night, wondering things like, “Will my teacher be a monster? Will I know anybody in my class? Is my entire world about to come crashing down around me?”

Three days later you’re gluing spaghetti strands to a piece of posterboard and everything’s fine. By the time you realize school is no big deal, you’re a receptionist for an insurance company and it’s too late.

Lacking that wisdom, you fret. The night before the first day of school is like a person’s last day on death row before being given a lethal injection. Much of the night is spent dreading what’s to come, but you also look back and try to cling to the good times, dragging positive memories into your ambiguous future as a kind of mental talisman. That time on the swings -- what a blast! That big lobster meal on Peak’s Island -- a magical excursion! These memories shall be my shield against homework and responsibility!

Cue the sound of an alarm clock. Poof, summer’s over.

By far, the hardest transition I had to make as a student was graduating from elementary school into middle school. First-day jitters mingled with new-school jitters, and to top it off, I had to get accustomed to seven new teachers instead of one, which for a 13-year-old is the stress equivalent of getting shot down behind enemy lines. My stomach was knotted tighter than a peach pit as I stood outside the building in the early-morning chill, waiting for the bell. It was too much to deal with, and too soon; shouldn’t I be lying in bed, I thought, resting up for a full day of bike riding and comic book reading? Why do I have to be thinking about all of this?

Then I walked into the lobby. The books-and-chalk smell from the classrooms had seeped into it by this point (or maybe it was permanently embedded into the walls), and this provided some measure of relief. Depending on the kind of student you are, this smell can elicit different reactions. If you’re unenthusiastic about school and don’t want to be there, it stinks worse than pig sweat on a fermented turd. If you’re generally a fan, it has a redemptive quality: Sure, your flat feet make gym class perpetually awkward, and sure, the eighth-grade bully doesn’t like the way you hold your pencil with the tips of your fingers -- but at least you get to walk into that smell each day. It conveys order and sanity. And perhaps a touch of future bronchial disease.

Much of the fall’s school-based anxiety is rooted in social uncertainty. Social structure has an importance in school that is completely out of whack with what a person experiences later in life. I’m now at a point where the people who like me are my friends, the people who don’t like me don’t talk to me, and the people who are in between send me impersonal birthday cards with small sums of money in them. I call this last group “Uncle Leonard.”

Seventh graders still live and die by who they’re seen with and how they’re perceived, especially if they’re moving up to a new school. The first few weeks are spent jockeying for position. First you locate your already-established friends so you can find your footing, get a good stable bassline going. Then, if you’re adventurous, you start finding ways to branch out, testing to see who among the unknown kids may be open to a social alliance. Athletes, musicians and participants in various clubs have a built-in mechanism for forging these bonds, but for the shyer, quieter kids -- i.e., me -- a little creativity is necessary. Unfortunately I was never socially creative; my crowning achievement in middle school was getting kids to pay me quarters each time I ate a morsel of food off the cafeteria floor. This probably explains why my closest friends had acne scars that looked like topographical maps of central Europe.

Ultimately it was the learning that really revved my engine. And that’s what school should be about in the first place. A few weeks into the year the initial fear and anxiety were all but forgotten, supplanted by fun facts about Napoleon and “‘i’ before ‘e’” and mitochondrial DNA. Adulthood is never what you imagine it to be, even if you meet with some measure of success, and so mourning summer seems silly in retrospect. It was when the air got brisk that things really started heating up.

So go, miniature sack-wearing people. Go walk into those halls and breathe deeply the scent of books and old wood. It may only seem a treasured time in retrospect. But that’s worth something, too.