Last Day of Work

Today was the final day of work for me. Exhausted, sad, and yet happy about it all being over, it seems hard to believe that 8 weeks went by so quickly! Being this was only the second summer I worked at this job, I hadn’t realized how much work went into it until I was elbow deep in textbooks, office supplies, desks, and paperwork. One of my coworkers had told me how weird it is to be on the administrative side of a summer program and today that was confirmed in my mind. The whole thing seems very surreal now…we started with a classroom full of chairs, set up an office, ran a school program for 5 weeks, cleaned up in 3 days, and left with an empty classroom. When we left today it looked as if no one had ever been there and yet we look back on the empty room with many fond memories; one would never guess—looking at the room now—that so much time and effort had been spent there. In the 3 weeks prior to the program, we hit the ground running. Starting on June 3rd, four of us unloaded our storage unit and put everything into our classroom. On June 6th, a different four of us came back, took desks out of the classroom, began to set up our office, take phone calls, return phone calls, proofread syllabi, organize textbooks, and much, much more. June 13th, two more people joined in the fun of running an office and we worked for 2 whole weeks before kids and teachers joined us for school on June 27th. During those two weeks we assigned classrooms, made rosters and teacher websites, edited websites, recreated websites (and edited them some more), made emergency plans, distributed textbooks, and tried to assign some order to the chaos before the beginning of school. It was a lot of fun…and I’m not being sarcastic. I thoroughly enjoyed working with each and every person in the office. Most of them I had known for a while so furthering those relationships was a blessing!

Once the kids came, things were going a hundred miles an hour. The first week was filled with taking kids to classes, answering teacher questions, testing kids for reading ability, occasionally being in the classroom as an actual TA, and doing other random tasks in the office after school. Some highlights of the overall program were having some of the same students from last year in one of my classes, getting to make a watermark and letterhead that we did and will be using for our transcripts from now on, helping with teacher luncheons every Wednesday and our appreciation luncheon at the end of the year, getting to work with old friends, getting to make new friends, getting to drive the golf cart (haha), running into poles with the golf cart, getting teased by our director, and just being blessed by having a lot of coworkers that were believers!

I am so thankful that the Lord gave me the opportunity to work at this job again and I am definitely looking forward to next year. There were many lessons I learned—patience and flexibility especially—and there were many found memories gained. I think most of all, I will miss the people I got to work with, but I am thankful that I will get to see most of them throughout the year. =D