Abstract:

"I haven't died. I have just changed jobs," Laura Reasoner Jones reminds as she moves from working with special-educatiion pre-schoolers to a technology job in the school system--an exciting move, but one with some painful goodbyes.

Jones L.R. Channeling Emly: 'Goodybe  to little children.' Teacher Leaders Network diaries. Retrieved from the Teacher Leaders Network 11 Apr 2008. Link: http://www.teacherleaders.org/old_site/diaries04_05/LJ29_04_05.html 

Full Text:

Channeling Emily: "Goodbye to Little Children"

Well, I did it. I took the technology job and probably have left teaching little children forever. And as I go through these last home visits, (link to 12 last days of school entry) I find myself living a little mental scenario that plays out over and over and is, of course, over-dramatized and over-sentimentalized, because that is the only way I can cope:

I am reminded of Emily, one of the main characters in Thornton Wilder's Our Town, one of my generation's seminal high school play productions. Come on, people, you know you read it, you analyzed it, and you probably staged it!

I picture myself as Emily in the consummate tear-jerking farewell scene. I'm wearing the white dress, and saying goodbye to all that I hold dear and never really saw when I was alive. Unfortunately, I probably look more like Miss Havisham in Great Expectations, another white-dress-clad heroine, but that is yet to be determined. In my heart, I am still Emily.

And so, here it goes:

EMILY: Goodbye.

    Goodbye to little children with messy hands and noses
    Goodbye to guilt-free Playmobil purchases

    To coming home covered in finger paint, glue and glitter
    To saving coffee cans, shoe boxes, toilet paper rolls, and Jell-O cups
    To buying new, expensive, tax-deductible Robert Sabuda pop-up books
    To using melted crayons and frozen glue from my toy-filled car
    To nursing an aching back from sitting on the floor or in tiny chairs
    To baking candy cane cookies and mini-pizzas
    To wearing silly watches that beep and purr and play bird noises
    To receiving hugs and crayon drawings as presents

    Goodbye to evening phone calls and chance parent meetings in grocery stores.
    Oh kids, you are too wonderful for anyone to realize you!

    Do teachers ever realize their jobs as they live them, every every minute?

And then my husband, the Stage Manager so well-played by Paul Newman in the last production of Our Town I saw, (this is my fantasy, remember!) says,

    Only some do. Only some.

And so my scenario comes to a close, with Miss Laura the preschool teacher fading into the sunset among all the other dead people from our town.

Oh yeah, well, I'll have to change that part.

I haven't died. I have just changed jobs.

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