Items on a Messy Desk: A Farewell

Two nearly identical gold keys. A red-leaf shrub leaf. Some index cards with messy handwriting. A binder full of cards and notes: These are the objects on my desk as I write this farewell to Liberty after 13 years as an English teacher at this beautiful school.

On my keychain over a decade ago I foolishly looped the brass key to my classroom beside a very similar key to my home. The two keys almost mirror each other in shape and size. At least once a week I mistakenly try to use my house key to unlock my classroom door when I come in to teach high-school writing in the morning. Of course, any practical STEM-type teacher would have simply moved the key to a different spot on the mess of rings and fobs and discount barcode tags, but did I mention I’m an English teacher with a background in theater? All these years, I’ve kept the two keys married because I love mixing them up, reminding myself through the happy accident this is my home. My classroom is a place where I’ve done as much living as my own house and grown just as much.

My roots here run deep. Next to the back door of the high school stands an inconspicuous shrub that tinges a deep burgundy as soon as we get the first frost. In my first year teaching here I had a junior-high order of 12 students assigned to me. Back then the orders were less epically named, yet my “Order of Scarlett” cohort wore red to competitions, made up cheers for ourselves, and bought a small “tree” to plant on the school grounds with the Penny Wars earnings designated for community improvements. The meager reward only bought a small burning bush—Cole’s Compact was the variety (for my impassioned order leader, Cole Goeltl)—and my gaggle of 12-year-olds were excited to beautify the barren grounds of our new school building by planting it beside the back door. The scarlet leaves this time of year are stunning, although sharp spines cover the twigs. The first few years, the bush was scrubby, struggling to take root, haggard and thirsty. I watered it a few times over the summer hoping it wouldn’t die. It flourished and grew lanky, reaching into the doorway. Around the time my daughter was born and I dropped to part-time, it was cut back, but it grew more bushy and stalwart with shorter, more prolific branches. That burning bush reminds me I put down roots here as soon as I started in 2013, and over time, my roots have deepened into the very foundation of this school.

As I cleaned out my desk, I found a stack of index cards with my own chicken-scratch handwriting on them. I almost tossed them but shuffled through the stack standing over the trash can. “Alexander Pope. Gertrude Stein. ibid. Modal Auxiliaries. Past Participle. Candide. Metaphorosis.” Why do I have a fat stack of cultural-literacy facts in the back of my desk drawer with the nametag I never wear, dry whiteout, bagged almonds, and extra staples? Then, of course, I remembered preparing for my Liberty job interview. It was the spring of 2013 and I’d recently returned from a year in Europe. I wanted to land a real teaching job after my time as a student teacher at Ridgeview, so I read E.D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know cover to cover and made flashcards of the content I needed to fill in the gaps from my own liberal-arts education.

My interview lasted three hours, and I was grilled on my English-content knowledge by some of the founders of the school as well as the current administration. Leaving the building, sweaty and buzzing, I felt better than after any other interview because I’d been asked to prove my objective knowledge of literature and answered every question confidently. When I was hired as a “content expert,” I was gratified to have been asked to demonstrate my knowledge and earn the position. I like to think this lessened my imposter syndrome. But flipping through the cards I realized how much I learned in my tenure as a Liberty English teacher. The contents of the cards are not just facts to me now but living, rich, full knowledge as much a part of me as anything. I know everything on those cards intimately, having taught and studied it all these years.

I imagine my fellow teachers have a binder like this squirreled away somewhere at home or in their classrooms. Mine is a three-inch binder, a haphazard scrapbook exploding with notes, cartoons, pictures, drawings, letters, and photos from parents, students, and colleagues. There’s the program from the first show I co-directed here, Singin’ in the Rain, and the bloody poster for the version of Hamlet I directed with only five students. There are Polaroids from The Importance of Being Earnest, which I produced as the first non-musical play. There are 13 years of Festival of Ideas paraphernalia, Favorite Poem Project set lists, speech and debate tournaments, and Domus Fortitudinis patches. I have souvenirs from EF trips I’ve led or chaperoned in Costa Rica, Rome, London, Paris, and Spain, as well as from the summer I spent in Seoul, Korea teaching English at our sister school, Gyeongseong Catholic High School. There are study guides from the National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships I did at Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn, NY, and The Poetry Foundation in Chicago, IL. There’s the cartoon verbal family Mr. Tullius and I made up—personifying verbals as a tiny furry family of Gerry the Gerund, Patsy the Participle, and Infant the Infinitive. There are photos of the English department book clubs reading Tartuffe or The Buried Giant or Moby-Dick at William Oliver’s or Mr. D’s living room. There’s my collection of hilarious malapropisms and disastrous thesaurus usage from 7th graders. Most importantly, though, are all the heartfelt notes of gratitude and love from my students.

I am returning to Michigan, where I met my husband and went to college, for a better life for my family. My husband will work as a master luthier at Shar Violins, and we’ll live in the Ann Arbor or Detroit area. We’ll be an hour from my family and in a house that fits all three of my growing children. Leaving this home where I have deep roots, where I’ve gained and shared so much knowledge, and where I have been deeply valued is one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. Yet I’m leaving this—my second-favorite teaching job—for an even more meaningful opportunity to share my knowledge as the primary educator of my own children. I intend to homeschool my kids, to write, and to direct and create theater and film in the burgeoning art scenes of Detroit and Ann Arbor. I will always be a teacher.

The future is bright, but this is a bittersweet parting. My tenure at Liberty has pushed me to become more human as a teacher, an artist, a writer, and a mother through the Great Conversations and striving for all that is good, true, and beautiful. Surrounded by the most wise, kind, thoughtful, funny, and intelligent people (especially in the English department), I have examined my life alongside the exacting measure of the best humans I know and gained the courage to make this change. “PRŌ PERMANENTIBUS” means “For what lasts” and is this year’s motto. Wisdom will always bring me home to Liberty because of these matching gold keys, rooted red leaves, anxious index cards, and heartfelt gratitude letters. These emblems, strewn on my perennially messy desk, and all they symbolize, are what lasts.