Ceaselessly the river flows, and yet the water is never the same, while in the still pools the shifting foam gathers and is gone, never staying for a moment.
32 years from my 55; 38 weeks from each year’s 52; 5 days from every 7; 8 hours from every day I have sat here and watched. Here I sit, behind this desk. A blackboard that turned white with age, as I have done some years ago, is behind me fixed to the wall. To my right is a computer and a newer laptop sits on the desk in front of me. The walls are littered with posters, samples of work, exemplar material, key words from topics recently studied. These things change, every year or so. The paper is flimsy and transient, curling ears indicating a need for restoration. And this room has seen restoration, updated 6, 7 years ago. Before, it had rows of wooden benches behind which the children sat on high wooden stools. The age of the desks dated not in the rings like a tree trunk but the dates accorded to pieces of graffiti, “Frank woz ‘ere September 1989” or “I hate Jason – Baz B ’93”. The dark wood was varnished, would be defaced, sanded down and varnished again, an almost natural cycle giving me the sense of fecundity about the room.
Now, the room is sterile. The new desks have laminate coatings and are geometrically designed in pods so children can sit facing each other. Designed for collaboration they have become abused by too much chatting and distraction. The children sit on blue plastic stools with metal legs, which they gleefully scrape across the new floor.
But here I still sit. In this room I have spent literally years of my life. Apparently teachers can have 1000 separate interactions per day. I must be in the millions by now. I enjoyed most of them. The majority were verbal, some not; instead they were expressive like a glare, or a scowl, even a raised eyebrow. Some were shouted, some whispered, some spoken with a wink in the eye, others with a tear. Some were inflammatory, some offensive, some instructive and some soothing.
But here I sit still. Teaching the children of children I once taught. The subject remains the same but the faces change. Plants will always photosynthesise, animals will always respire, and organisms will always reproduce. The children come in and out of the door to my classroom like waves of the sea. Over time and the years, class upon class, wave upon wave of young faces break upon my classroom shore, flowing ceaselessly through room 28, my room. Sometimes faces remain familiar for longer, like a leaf that finds itself caught with floating debris in an eddy circling behind a rock in a lazy river. Students make an impression, a connection is made, maybe even a friendship, but time and the flow of its waters soon loosen the anchor of attachment and faces will float off into the distance of memory.
But here I sit still, my feet dipped in that flowing river, sensing the strength of the current increase, the flow quicken. The years pass by with alarming rapidity. Without noticing entire cohorts of children can come and go through the doors of the school. Faces remembered as tiny, anxious little ones will change, quick as a flash into proud older teenage faces, dressed in fine clothes for the leavers ball.
But here I sit still, because I haven’t changed. My face and flesh may flow, sinking downwards as the tide of youth recedes but I don’t change, me, the id, my ego. It’s still me.
You know, I read once that you cannot step twice into the same river.
