I never thought a classroom could feel like a coffin, but here I am, staring at desks that don’t hold children anymore—just ghosts.

The building smells of bleach now, sharp and clinical. Not the warm dust-and-pencil-shavings air I breathed for forty years.

Back then, I could tell what month it was by the scent—the damp coats in January, the chalk dust in May, the waxed floors in September. These walls used to hum with laughter, with secrets whispered behind math books, with the thump of sneakers as boys tried to show off in the hallway. Now it’s silent. Too silent.

I started teaching in ’68, when the world outside was tearing itself apart. Vietnam on the television, riots in the streets, Nixon on the radio. But inside my classroom?

We built forts out of encyclopedias. We learned cursive. We recited the Pledge with hands over hearts that still believed in something steady. I was young then, hair dark, voice strong. I thought I could save them all.

I remember Tommy Greeley—couldn’t sit still to save his life, but he could take apart a transistor radio and put it back together without a screw missing. His father worked at the mill, came home with grease up to his elbows.

One afternoon, I caught Tommy doodling radios all over his spelling test. Instead of scolding, I told him, “Kid, the world’s gonna need men like you.” Years later, he sent me a letter from Silicon Valley, said he built computers now. Still couldn’t spell worth a damn, but he thanked me for not crushing that spark.

But the world changed. God, it changed. The kids started coming in tired, eyes glued to screens I didn’t understand. Parents stopped showing up for conferences. Respect—once the backbone of the classroom—turned brittle and broke.

I watched as politicians who never set foot in a school cut us into test scores and funding scraps. And every year, the chalkboards shrank, the silence grew, and I wondered if I belonged to a country that had outgrown me.

I’m 74 now. My hair is the color of old chalk. I don’t have the fight in me anymore, not the way I did when I stood in front of thirty restless souls and dared them to dream bigger than their town.

Some mornings, I don’t even recognize the nation outside my window. The streets feel meaner. The flags feel more like arguments than unity. And yet—when I close my eyes—I still see the children as they were. Bright-eyed, restless, hungry for life.

The truth is, teaching broke me in places I didn’t know could break. Nights grading until my hands cramped, days swallowing tears when a child told me they had no dinner waiting at home.

I carried their pain, tucked it inside my chest like loose papers in a folder. I never had children of my own, but I had thousands of them. And each one left a mark.

I walk through the empty halls now, my cane tapping on tiles polished too clean. I pause at Room 12, my room. The paint’s been stripped, the old bulletin boards gone.

But I can still see Jenny Parker’s poster of the solar system, letters slanting crooked, colors bright as hope. I can still hear the roar of applause when Miguel, shy as a church mouse, finally read his first full page without stuttering. These memories—they’re carved into me deeper than any scar.

People say America isn’t what it used to be. Maybe they’re right. Maybe we traded something precious for speed, for screens, for noise.

But I know this: a child’s laughter, the weight of a hand raised to ask a question, the light in their eyes when the world suddenly makes sense—those things don’t belong to any decade. They belong to forever.

I lean on the doorframe one last time, let the silence settle heavy. I don’t fit in the America outside these walls, not anymore. But I know I fit here, in the unseen history of chalk dust and paper planes, of small victories and stubborn hope.

And maybe that’s enough.

Because even if the world forgets me, the children won’t.

And God willing, the lessons will outlive the teacher.