This is the end?

It's an odd life that I lead.

I meet a hundred or so new people each August, hang out with them and get to know a lot of them really well for about nine months, and then we part ways. Some of them I get to see in passing the following year and others stay in contact for a lot longer, but many of them leave and pretty much never return to lovely Room 519.

It's a seemingly-endless cycle of hellos and goodbyes. Admittedly, at this point in the school year, there a few goodbyes that I'm more than happy enough to offer, but a lot of my students will be missed. Some of them - student aides, Pasta for Pennies folks - seem like they'll be completely irreplaceable, but someone always seems to step forward the next year to get the work done, and it's amazing.

My problem right now is that the school year - as we have it set up right now - is entirely lacking in closure as there is no specific last day of school on which we can say our final goodbyes.

About three weeks before the year ends, our seniors have their final day of regular classes, and some of them don't come back into the building.

Then, over the next few days, some of the seniors come back to take their senior exams - typically shortened versions of the underclass exams. And then they're done.

A week or so after that, the underclass students wrap up their regular class days and drift away. They can be exempt from their exams if they do well enough on grades and attendance, and others recognize that their exam grades don't affect their semester grades (C-C-anything ends up being a C), so those kids don't take their exams. Another group gone.

Then there's this week, a series of half-length days with two exams each day. Classrooms half-filled - or less - with students taking their exams like punishment, and by the end, they certainly aren't in the mood for the solid, heartfelt goodbyes that it seems appropriate to give them.

And the halls are much too empty to catch the ones I should've said goodbye to when I had the chance.

I miss the old ways, the full exams, everybody here until the very last. Everyone yelling and screaming their way down the hall on the final day.

Instead, we get a building that teems with life all year long slowly stripped of its vitality a few cells at a time.

Where's the dignity, where's the finality.

It's like watching a friend die a breath at a time.

Gimme my heart attack, my grand mal, my hit by a bus and died painlesly.

This fade to black doesn't work for me...