Spring Fever

I have never been much of a believer of the concept of Spring Fever, that idea that both students and teachers alike get ancy and jittery the last few weeks of school and have trouble concentrating. The only time as a student I remember having anything like Spring Fever was during my senior year of high school. Once the A.P. tests were taken in mid-May I pretty much quit. I remember right after the A.P. English test our English teacher handed our class a copy of Joyce's PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN and said, "With our remaining time in this course we will be reading this novel. We will not take a test on it, but we will read and discuss it for our own edification." Uh, no WE won't, I thought to myself. And to this day I have never read that book.

But my senior year was an exception to the rule, in part because I think I understood I was staring at a giant change coming to my life, and I was distracted by that. Other than that one instance, I have never really felt that inability to focus in April and May, and as a teacher I fought against it with my students. I never stopped teaching until the last day of school (and I never told my students that something we did in the last two weeks of school was for their edification only, either) and when they complained I would brush off their complaints and say, "Look, your parents are paying me to teach you for 177 days, not 150," and then I would just go on. I knew teachers in adjoining classrooms had already packed it in for the year and were playing Trivial Pursuit in class or something like that or watching movies, but I didn't care, mostly, I guess, because I believed that sentence I was saying to the kids.

All of that said, though, I need THIS school year to be over. It has been a long one and a tough one for a lot of reasons, and I need these students and teachers to go away and leave me alone for a couple of months.