Rub a dub dub
Three men in a tub
The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker
Nursery rhymes are important because rhyme is important. Human language developed rhyme (most likely) because it helped us learn to associate one thing with another, to give us a sort of mental jingle to remember.
For so many years, we remembered so many things by the music of them. For so, so many years, people preserved what became The Bible by chanting it. Because of that, and all the years of translations done lovingly (or crudely) we end up with “though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death,” and “the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep.”
Rhyme is important because in English, they help us fine-tune or pronuciation so it’s similar enough to the mean. We can be understood, even though our individual voices and musicalities and accents and dialects vary. “Dub” rhymes with “tub,” and “bakers” must rhyme with “makers.” Rhymes are our calibration technique, our tuning forks, our standard.
(When these rhymes fade out, as they sometimes do in Shakespeare, due to changes in pronunciation, it is a strange ghost to meet.)
All last days of school rhyme. I am shell-shocked. It seems like it will never end. It will never end. And then it does. It’s one of the bolder transitions working adults experience, now that most of us don’t work in seasons. The teachers, the farmers, the landscapers, have lurches in time. Everything changes.
I bring a book on writing to a kid I wish would want to read it. “My dad doesn’t want me hording so many things,” he says, though I think he’s also saying, “I’m not ready for that. I can’t tell my truth yet.”
I peel 3×5 cards with students’ names off, removing two strips of my beloved clear packing tape. “Remember that day the freshmen got new seats, and they all threw a fit and went down to the principal, and then she yelled at them for 20 minutes?”
“Oh, yeah,” says my aide. How I treasure being able to look at another adult and say, “Did that happen?”
Bless her. Bless her.
Bless her also for putting up with me, as when I insisted we continue with our three minutes of silence at the start of class, but my students began to be so prickly about it, I realized it was about my power, and not about soothing them. “Let’s just not do that any more for now,” I said.
“I think that’s good,” she said.
The last meeting I have to attend requires me to take a full dose of anti-anxiety meds, and sit brittly crossing out letters in yet another theory book, mentally raging with disagreement and frustration and fury at being ignored and underestimated and fury at injustice.
The meeting ends.
Since schools began revolving around testing, the end of school has become flabbier and more grating. They are done. We are done. In some places, discipline rather disappears. In some places, students who haven’t done anything or come to school suddenly appear and make demands. I offer them a writing assignment to write about themselves, about the lowest-hanging fruit I can dangle. Most of them write something.
The last day, the kids come in. We have three and a half hours to be together for no reason. Grades aren’t technically due until midnight that day, but grades are mostly already posted. We don’t change classes like a normal schedule. The kids who come just wander the building. There are more of us than of them.
I teach two of my students to play Mexican Train Dominoes. One of them is getting a kitten, and I try to help name the kitten. I make the European ambulance noise we make in my family when someone plays a double, and they find this… frustrating.
I take them downstairs to help me move things. Having young people move heavy things is missing from our schools, normally. Honestly I think I should load up some boxes of books and just have kids move them around the building from time to time, just for the mental health benefits. One of the kids manages to pick up the recliner I’m getting from a teacher friend downstairs, and rolls it, end over end, up the flight of stairs to my room.
I’ve never had a comfortable chair in my room, partly because I never wanted to deal with the kids fighting over who got to sit in the chair.
I have decided me being able to sit in it and recline will be worth it. “I’m going to put up the partitions around it and nap instead of teach,” I tell my aide.
I print out a document that has a picture of cheese and underneath says “Cheeeeeeese!” for a colleague.
A kid tries to get me to play Monopoly, and I say I do not play Monopoly.
My Charlie-Chaplin-esque student will not be back. Will go back to the regular school full-time. “I’ve learned a lot about controlling my anger,” he has written on a self-evaluation. He has.
Someone brings up the eighth graders, and introduces them, and the high school teachers shiver. How, how, how will we get them to act like high schoolers?
They’re so babyish.
I make a map of my classroom showing where the desks go.
I put my key in an envelope.
Just to be that girl, I also put in the envelope of keys that don’t seem to go to anything in my room. I have labeled this envelope, “Keys to nothing.” The principal’s secretary says, “Oh, and what are these for?” and I feel like a bit of a dick, but then, I went to all the trouble to try all those keys in all those locks when I had a student insisting on using a computer after facetiming someone on a computer in my room. For a few days, I put the computers under lock and key, and lightning flashed.
I decide I will pick up my lunch rather than having it delivered. I have energy, actually, a bit. I’d talked with a colleague right before I left. Teachers are so relentlessly optimistic. We talk about things to make better next year. I do not think any of it will work. But it is the last day of school, and optimism will return to me, in time.
I get out of the car to pick up my food, and I see I still have the keys to the computer cabinet.
The theory on “rub a dub dub” is that a tub is like a circus sideshow, and the men are being shamed for looking at something wrong or dirty. That “rub a dub dub” is a sort of “yadda yadda,” or “tsk tsk.”
What matters is that it rhymes.
Going On 