Writing the date on the blackboard
It is more years than I like to think of since I stopped teaching English in junior high school. Why now, I wonder, am I thinking of that little daily act of writing the date on the blackboard?
I think I know why. Back then in Massachusetts, the first day of school was the Wednesday after Labor Day. And that date is coming up. This Wednesday, it will be September 8, 2010. Today is Labor Day, September 6, 2010.
When I was teaching school, every day I stood on tiptoe and stretched my arm as far it could go and wrote the date as high up on the blackboard as I could.
It seems now that the day didn’t start until I wrote the date on the blackboard. It was a soothing thing for me, and it must have been for the kids as well, for all eyes would turn, and, rapt, they would watch me write the date on the blackboard.
It must be that, before I wrote the date, I took a chalky blackboard eraser and erased yesterday’s date.
And then I would write the new date. I can almost feel my fingers writing Monday, September 6, 2010, as neatly as I could.
There was a satisfaction in writing out the whole date. Maybe it made me believe that I really was the schoolteacher and not the child who had spent so many years in the classroom. Of course, when one of the 7th-grade homeroom students would ask if he could write the date in chalk on the blackboard, I said, “Yes.” And the 7th grader would stretch his arm up as far as he could, and we all knew it was a privilege to write the day’s date on the blackboard.
These days I find the date in the lower right hand corner of my computer. I have to click the time in order to see the date. The date the computer gives me. is always correct. It doesn’t have to think. It just knows.
I sit in the same place in front of the computer every day for much of the day.
Sometimes I check the date a few times a day to be sure it’s still the same day it was the last time I checked. There is such a reassurance in the date, such a solidity, even though it is ever-changing. The date on the blackboard is such a marker of non-existent time.
But of all the years of teaching school, how can it be that, of all things, right now I am missing writing the date on the blackboard? I am missing the children, yes, too.
Yet, right now, on this date, Monday, September 6, 2010, I am missing the simple act of writing the date on the blackboard.
Godwriting is a blog by Gloria Wendroff and is about Gloria's daily life as the Godwriter of the Heavenletters project that is having a profound effect on the lives of people around the world.
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