It's Monday...

and I'm still in the school, because I live here, but I'm not teaching! It's finally summer holiday here in Hungary for most primary schools. I still have to go in to fill out some paperwork and sign the naplo books.

That wonderful feeling that it's over is still cascading over me like a massive falling tidal wave.

Looking back to my sentiments last year, I was different. I was deeply affected by leaving my schools and sad to say good-bye to my students. This year was last year's evil twin. Still in Hungary, still teaching, but all the little things came together in a way to make this year an absolute struggle.

Everyone has a different experience and I definitely don't regret teaching this year. It forced me to brutally observe myself as a teacher in those trickiest moments of the profession and taught me to see how I need to act in those situations. Not that I did the right things. I failed, I tried, I failed, I tried, something almost worked, I tried again, I failed.

If anything, I know how to feign confidence and be a better actress in the classroom. Because even if I didn't have my shit together, I sure had to act like I did, as to not get eaten alive.

On the last day of school, I was showered with more chocolate than I know what to do with, more flowers than I know what to do with (currently exploding out of my Nalgene bottle), and other assorted gifts including two engraved pens from classes I hoped to forget as soon as I left the graduation ceremony.

The graduation ceremony took place after three lessons that morning, in which I played a variation of "Circle of Death" with my deck of cards in the sweltering heat of too many 12 year old bodies plus myself.

The students carried flowers and walked as a chain line through the school while the other lower classes dutifully watched. Only one boy, half Hungarian, half Finnish Christian said hello to me. It was somewhat nice to see something other than utter indifference on these children's faces as they walked past me.

As the ceremony moved outside the school, I stood with Agi, a colleague who suddenly opened up to me after I gave each of my English teaching colleagues a thank you note on a Chicago postcard and some chocolate.

Looking absolutely surprised that I had given her something, Agi said that she didn't know how much any of my colleagues deserved any thanks for helping me. She told me, "maybe if you had come up to the teacher's room more often, we could have helped, but we had so many situations happening this year and we were so busy."

My contact teacher later said, "if you can teach here you can teach anywhere." I don't know about that exactly. She also asked me if I had seen the big tree on the wall downstairs. I said I hadn't. She told me that the students wrote a sentence about each teacher on the tree. Next to mine, the students wrote, "I hope you can forgive us."

So everyone knew how much of a struggle this year was for me, even my students.

As Agi and I were watching balloons be let off into the air symbolizing the onward journey of the eigth class, I asked her where a certain boy from class 8A was. He was the boy who asked to go to the bathroom during my lesson way back in February, only never to return. As a follow up to an entry from several months ago, I guess the boy got what was coming to him.

A gym teacher got so mad at him that he hit the boy. Neither the boy nor the teacher have come back to the school.

Sadly, I didn't find out that I wasn't alone in this challenge to manage middle school Hungarians from Budapest until the end.

When the ceremony was over and the 7th class was ordered to carry the chairs the 8th years were sitting on back inside, two girls from a bad class lingered near me. "Good-bye and good summer...bye." I wished them well and smiled politely.

Agi smiled and told me then that those girls had come up to her praising my teaching often.

It's very hard to get accurate feedback in teaching, but it's even harder getting it in a foreign school. That last word from Agi carried me a long way and made me feel like this year wasn't all that much of a waste to every student I taught.

With that, I hope to start weeding out the dreams I have at night where I'm teaching and not give another thought to students or school for a while now.