Today, I cleaned out my classroom and got out all of my personal belongings out of my room. I conversed for a bit with the office and took the few boxes I had all over the classroom and talked about where I was working next year since our school is closing.

If there was one theme of what's happened in the classroom for over the past two months, it was mice.

Mice droppings were everywhere, all over the tables, all over the chairs, all over the desks, behind desks that I had to move, under the tables. Almost everywhere I went around the room had mice poop all over it. Well, if the classroom couldn't be a safe space for kids in the last two months given the pandemic, I'm glad it was at least a safe place for mice.

Departing from my classroom made me think of havens and safe spaces for each of us. Right now, that's our homes. But during the year, for how many kids is the classroom a safe space? A classroom, in theory offers a sense of stability in the form of adults, an environment, other students, and a consistent lesson.

What are their lives now without that stability? What is mine? It's true that we have all gravitated towards a new normal, but how the basics of a classroom structure imbue themselves in every parts of our lives. We have a routine when we enter, just like we do when we wake up in the mornings.

Without the stability of routine, where would we be? As many adults will say children need structure, I will argue that children more so need consistency. It doesn't matter how many people agree or disagree, but consistency offers the best sense of normalcy.

In every interview I had with administration and principals, one thing I made sure to note was that I showed up to work every day. This might just be because I am a 23-year-old man in good health and no kids or a spouse, but the look on every principal's face seemed to glow when I told them that I showed up to work every day and got in all my reports in on time.

Why?

The world of education is a microcosm for the outside world, but not everyone shows up to work every day. The sense of normalcy is disrupted -- every person has to adjust. I love my co-workers and I know that life happened, but the less people we had at work on a given day, the more we suffered. Some days were bad, but a wise teacher told me that no matter what happened, it would have been a lot worse if I wasn't there.

Consistency means showing up, every single day. I don't doubt that people showing up to work every day isn't a thing that happens in other fields and professions, but that just having a sense of stability and consistency is very important for people.

That sense went away once the pandemic completely changed our lives, but I looked back on my classroom and took the year in stride. Times I told my kids to get back and stay in the classroom made me chuckle, as well as the fun discussions about the books we were reading flashed back to me.

I paused for a couple moments longer as I was leaving my classroom for probably the last time and having to make a transition this year. It was a departure. No, the school year isn't over, and I'm not done with my online teaching, but it was a departure is just a change in a sense of normalcy. Teaching in its traditional sense, having kids in the classroom instead of across the screen, is over for the foreseeable future.

And I was just starting to get used to it.

Departures was a movie I watched a couple years ago and had to write a college analysis about. It was a movie about a young man who has to return to his hometown after failing as a musician, and to make ends meet, he takes the job of a nokanshi, a Japanese mortician. People do not like him taking up this line of work. In Japanese culture, the taboo against people who worked and surrounded themselves through death was profound -- and yet the main character, Daigo, found redemption in the beauty of his work at preparing departures for the dead.

He is abandoned by his family, constantly avoided in public because of his work (and the fact that he smelled like the dead), and is socially ostracized by his friends. But he sticks with it, and for him, despite all the hardship and stigma from the work, he finds the work of being a mortician as a constant. He is diligent and devoted, clinging to work for a sense of normalcy that family, friends, and society cannot provide. Even Daigo's wife, when pregnant, wishes he can find a new job so their child can be proud of his job.

The point of Departures is that it is in having that constant that we find fulfillment. For me, that constant has been my job this year. As much as I liked to complain and be negative, closing the lights and closing my locked door, turning in the key to the teacher's lounge, I felt this strange sense of loss, mixed with a tinge of gratitude for the ability to have a fresh start.

My students and I went on this journey that was extremely chaotic, often painful, and very educational in a sense that we were always learning from each other. My kids taught me that you're always getting an education, and it's not always the education you planned on getting, whether it came in the form of throwing markers or even worse things across the room or whether it tested my ability to prevent bullying and harassment from happening and keeping my kids safe.

This was a year when I was most in touch with my humanity -- mainly the fact that I wasn't good at a lot of things, was really flawed as an instructor, and genuinely just needed a lot of work on all fronts if I wanted to help the way I wanted to. Few experiences have made me consciously think "wow, I really need Jesus" as much as being a first year special ed teacher in a Baltimore City middle school has.

I closed the lights of my room, loaded the boxes and posters onto the car, said goodbye to my school, realizing that I'm a much stronger, more resourceful, and resilient person than I was in September. I couldn't have learned those lessons any other way.