That Last Day of School Feeling

Teaching is a hard job, but it also comes with perks others don’t get. One of the biggest is the last day of school. It is a cathartic moment, one of unbridled joy and happiness that I get to have every year. During my brief time working outside of education, it felt like the weeks all blended into each other in a kind of indistinct emotional mush. The school year has its intense periods and lulls, ending with the ultimate moment of release.

Tuesday was the last day of the year at my school, and it felt great. Students came to give me appreciations, I signed some yearbooks, and at graduation the prior weekend got to make some hearfelt goodbyes. The moment of finality gives students and teachers something to look forward to, a promise that makes getting through the hardest times of the school year possible.

Most people don’t get that in their adult lives. As much as I love the last day of school as a teacher, nothing could match the feeling that overcame me in childhood, especially in those sweet years where I was old enough to ride my bike around and have the stereotypically unsupervised Gen X summer fun, and young enough that I didn’t have to work. There were endless games of Dungeons and Dragons and driveway basketball, long trips to the library, and the pleasures of daytime television. The Price is Right theme still inspires feelings of bliss to me. It reminds me of lazing around the house in the mid-morning, not a care in the world. Adult slackers still have to worry about paying bills; when you’re a kid you can truly glory in doing nothing.

I am sure we all have that one epic last day of school we can’t forget. That personal memory is why a film like Dazed and Confused, taking place on the last day of school in 1976, still has such an intense cult following. More than any other film it gets at both the ennui and the absolute freedom of teendom in the summertime.

My own perfect last day didn’t involve a beer bust at the moon tower or anything like that. It was the last day of 7th grade, after I had made it through my first year of junior high. I was 13, on the cusp of maturity, excited for what came next. My friend Sam and I went to see an early evening showing of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade on opening night. I walked out of that theater on a typically torrid Nebraska summer night on a complete high, looking at the whole summer stretched out in front of me, yet to be lived.

Adulthood never allows me to feel that free, but being a teacher means I still get a slice of that bliss. If you’re not an educator, I hope you get your own last day of school feeling sometime soon, too.