A Little Black Stool

This worn, chipped, dusty stool is probably the single most important thing in my entire classroom. It means more to me--and to many of my students--than any of the hundreds of notes, pictures, or even cards that line my shelves and walls. It's more important to what happens in my room than the laptops, the pens and pencils, or the books. This battered black perch is why I teach.

This stool has been privy to a lot over the past ten years. Every day, students drag this stool to the edge of my desk and settle in. Sometimes they have their laptops open, sometimes a notebook, sometimes just their hearts and stories. But as they sit there, that's where the real joy of my teaching begins. I love the moments in front of my classroom, watching my freshmen read Romeo and Juliet out loud and giggle at Mercutio. I love watching my sophomores fume over Daisy's betrayal of Gatsby or my seniors as they tear up as Hamlet takes his last breaths. These moments with my entire class can sometimes feel like the stuff of movies, and they are magical. But it's the quiet moments, the one-on-one moments that take place on that little black stool, that really remind me why I do this job.

When I read through the cards my seniors left me as they headed out into this world, more than one mentioned pulling that stool up to my desk, and more than one proclaimed the stool to be theirs. This week, my proctor marched into my room and hovered, agitated, over a friend who was sitting there, chatting. When her friend scurried off to class, my proctor grabbed the stool, dragged it next to me, and said defiantly, "Sorry, [name], but this is my spot." I know that for more than one student, their strongest memories of my classroom will have happened sitting there.

During workshop weeks, that stool feels haunted. It sits empty and I swear I feel the ghosts of the hundreds of students who've sat there before crowding in. My room often feels forlorn during that week before school starts, suspended in the sad limbo between what I've lost and what's about to come. The echoes of the voices that filled the previous year still seem to whisper during that week.

And then--then it all begins. One hundred and eighty new students stream into my classroom on a warm Tuesday in September and they drown out the echoes that seemed so loud just a few days before. New students unceremoniously drag the stool to my desk, and suddenly new voices crowd in. I find the spirits that just a few days ago haunted my room fading as new college essays demand attention, as new thesis statements need approval, as new anxieties and hopes and fears and gossip swirl around me. There's only so much noise a room can take.

Thursday, as one of my seniors and I labored over his college essay, laughing and trying to find the right words to impress NYU and UChicago, I glanced at my desk and saw a post it a past student had stuck on my bulletin board. I was jolted into the previous year momentarily, remembering sitting there with him, writing the college essays that spun him away from Elk River nine months later, lead him to the dorm room he was probably sitting in at that very moment. A momentary flash of loss, and then it was gone.

That's the nature of teaching. So many stories fill our lives, but in the end, they're always temporary. I get older, and yet the voices that fill my room are forever suspended in time--perpetually worried about college and careers and the exhausting drama that makes up life from the ages of fourteen to eighteen. There's something so beautiful about that. It makes it easier to let go, in the end, knowing that it'll all be back next year. Knowing the haunted feeling will be crowded out and new students will take up their places in my heart.

Knowing that little black stool will always find its way back to the edge of my desk.

As it all begins again.