Balanced, home

During the first day of summer break, the custodians opened every locker in the halls of Oberlin High School.  The locker doors would stand open for a few hours while the custodians cleaned them out; they'd throw all the contents into a giant, industrial-sized trash can.  OHS was small and quickly traversed -- if you looked at a floor plan of the hallways from above, it would look like a lollipop on a stick -- and an enterprising seven year-old could easily investigate each and every locker before the custodians finished, skimming out treasures:  mechanical pencils with plenty of lead, a miniature stapler, an abandoned ugly clay ashtray from art class, a red knit hat.  The school was empty, save the custodians, administrators, and a few teachers who were still finishing up their grades and cleaning their classrooms.  The halls were ghostly-silent, and anyone who'd ever fought through their normally boisterous cacophony would find the whole thing eerie.

To me -- because of course, this seven year-old was me -- the silence felt like relief.  These halls were empty, and the school belonged to me.  I was the only one free within its walls, after all; everyone else had a job to do, including my father the math teacher, but this place was my playground.  I cartwheeled (poorly) down the tiled floors and rifled through the lost and found (it was all going in the trash anyway!) and made up stories about the trophies in the display case and bothered the office manager until she entertained me in her soft, Scottish burr.

I followed my dad to school often enough that the high school felt as comfortable as my own living room.  I was in the back of the library with a book when he had professional development, and I sat in his Trig classroom on Take Your Daughter To Work Day, and I knew the place, in a way that I never quite knew my elementary or middle schools.  There, I was only a student.  At OHS, I was a spiritual landlord: I'd look at my father's giant, terrifying students and think, "you're only going to be in this building for four years, but I have known it for years and will know it for years to come.  This is my place -- though I'm happy for you to visit."

And then, of course, I was a student there.  I had about fifty anxiety dreams on the night before school started, mostly about getting lost:  in these dreams, the high school danced and warped out of its normal form.  It lost its familiar lollipop shape and gained a forest, an ocean, a skyscraper, a Space Needle, a car factory.  I woke many times that night, shaking, my nails cutting into my palms, my teeth clamped shut.  I wasn't scared of not fitting in or making enemies -- I was scared of not feeling like I was home.

I needn't have worried.  High school was -- well, high school.  Having taught in three very different ones, I can pretty much guarantee that teenagers are teenagers, wherever you are.  And I loved my high school.  I hated my place in it sometimes -- I hated that I often didn't know how to act around people (students and teachers), that everyone else seemed to understand a social rulebook that I'd never received (apparently this is normal?) -- but I loved my school and the people in it with a fierce devotion that shocked me.  I loved the laughter and the arguments and I loved walking in laps around the lollipop's ring in the morning with two of my friends and I loved the way the hallways were noisy, now, full of joyful, effervescent chaos.  I wasn't the sole proprietor of the school anymore -- I couldn't run madly down its empty halls and pillage its lockers -- but I was a shared owner.  It seemed better this way.

It's why I love my job.  It's why I step in front of a classroom and feel myself relaxing, not tensing.  The giant, stupid grin that crosses my face on Monday mornings when my teenagers grumble their ways in is not a joke or a trick: I missed this place.  I missed these people.

It's also why I have no balance in my life.

I don't know if you know this -- okay, I know that some of you know this -- but the International Baccalaureate Organization (a system in which I teach) has proclaimed there to be ten main traits that all learners should cultivate.  The traits read like a shiny resumé:  caring, knowledgeable, inquirers, thinking, reflective, risk-takers, communicators, principled, open-minded, and balanced.

Despite the inevitably reductive nature of classification, they're good traits, and they're at the core of why I love the IB:  a student can be the most knowledgeable and inquiring kid around, for example, but if they don't take risks with that knowledge, it'll never go anywhere -- and if they're not caring or principled, they're a little scary.

The kids don't always get why the "balanced" trait is so important, or so difficult.  It's not glamorous.  It doesn't sound like a category in Divergent or some other young adult dystopian trilogy.  It just means... you like sports?  Or something?

Adults understand why balance is important, and they also generally understand themselves to be terrible at it.  It's a weird idea, balance:  would the best version of it be an equal, measured involvement in each part of your life?  Or would it be a swiftly tilting boogie-board of love -- love for your job, love for your family, love for yourself, taking turns as you fall headlong from one to another to another?  Or is it something in between?

I ask because I genuinely don't know.  When I'm at school, I feel like I'm home, and not in a bad way.  I don't know how to separate myself from it.  It's easy for me to tumble heedlessly into a rabbit hole of work because it doesn't feel like work.  Then I emerge, blinking, into the harsh light of summer vacation and realize that I have almost literally nothing interesting to say for myself:  all that I am is teaching.  Ask me what I do in my spare time, and I'm lost.

Let me be clear:  I don't think I'm special.  All humans struggle with balance and I just happen to be one of them.  I also think it's possible to love teaching, to feel it as a vocation, and not be consumed by it.  I have friends and role models who do it every day.  My father, a teacher in his very sinews, always had something non-school related to say at the dinner table.  And I would never, ever take back my childhood ownership of Oberlin High School, those hallways that ran through me like veins.

Because the result is this: every high school I've stepped into since has also felt like home.  In Seattle, Cape Town, New York, Federal Way, Beijing, Singapore:  I push open the front doors and something in me unwinds.  I walk through halls I've never walked before and have to restrain myself from dancing, jumping, skipping.  I check in at the main office, sign the log book, and say hi to the office assistant.  I think, quietly, "You might not know me yet, but these hallways do.  And I belong here."