art isn't meant to last

A few minutes before class, two gruff, oil stained men saunter into my room. The first man scratches himself and then pulls out a sketch on a sheet of graph paper. "I don't think there's adequate plumbing. Looks like they'll have to knock out the wall."

The second man continues with the suggestion of widening the bathroom and perhaps knocking down the wall. "All of this will have to be painted over, too," he says and points to the mural we painted on our class wall.

A few students turn to me with a horrified look. I wait in silence until I can explain that they won't let me have my classroom next year. "It's not as bad as other schools. One whole school is being shut down. This is just a classroom." A student reminds me, "Mr. Spencer, comparing our pain to theirs doesn't take away the fact that this really sucks." She's right

Kids protest that people can't paint over our wall. They brainstorm idealistic solutions, like calling the news (I highly doubt Channel Ten would respond to a classroom wall being painted) or writing a petition. To my surprise, a couple of students actually tear up. I forget how emotional and sentimental kids are in junior high. It's the age when they are just beginning to learn that nothing in life lasts - the age of first crushes, BFFs that they'll someday forget, school projects that are still stored in a parent's closet.

I write the quote from Pericles, "What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.” When the kids ask about him, I explain that he was the first politician to use pithy soundbytes. Perhaps he even coined the term, "It's time for a change."

We meander through the idea of art and whether it's supposed to last, whether it's worth it to try and leave a legacy in life and the concept of who owns schools (the community, the parents, the district, the government). It makes me wish I could teach the Book of Ecclesiastes.