New Year's Eve

It's New Year's Eve -- a new school year, that is.

Labor Day weekend is the traditional end of the summer, and this year is no exception. As I walked into the school this afternoon for a few final preparations for tomorrow's opening day, I noticed the floors, waxed and buffed to a high shine. Within a few weeks, that shine will fade, as new pencils are worn down, full notebooks become thinner and backpacks show the strain of use and abuse.

As I enter my ninth year of teaching, I find that I am less excited as I have been in the past. It's not that this year is less exciting; in fact, there are many things for which I am enthusiastic. I think it is that I have reached a point in this career that there are fewer new things to excite me, and at the same time, there are a lot more things to wear down me and my colleagues. This school year brings great accomplishments with our state test results -- results that are a bit misleading because many who might have been eligible for testing were excluded and will be included this year. The year brings new challenges with personnel and curriculum changes. The year brings the challenge of higher enrollment -- where to put the students, who to teach them and how will that affect everything else?

The year started a day early with the participation of our students in a football game, the Old Spice Emerald City Kickoff Classic, held today at Qwest Field in Seattle, the home field of the Seahawks. Our team lost, but it was a nice experience in the crisp late-summer air under the blue skies with wispy clouds. The facility is a jewel in the city, a public stadium that dwarfs everything inside. The band sounded fantastic, and it was nice to see som many people who had made the trek across the Cascades for one last fling before bucking down to the wearying routines of daily schooling.

But the bright spots for me are always the moments in my own classes. Tuesday morning, there will be a rush of thousands of shoes over those waxed and buffed floors, and students will shuffle to classes. Some will cruise the halls familiarly, while others will stumble to find a classroom at the end of a long hallway. We'll call the roll, go over the syllabus and start the teaching by cracking open those new notebooks and sharpening those new pencils.

So it is on New Year's Eve, the mixed emotion of a fading summer and the promise and excitment, though tempered, of a new term.

-- Wenatchee, Wash.