LEWISTON
From his desk in the back row of Room 322, a boy with spiky hair used a rolled sheet of paper as a trumpet and megaphone.

At the blackboard, a girl scrawled “Bye everyone!” in blue and white chalk.

Another student paused at the classroom door to snap a photo and was gone before the flash faded.

In the middle of it all, teacher Sherry Smith tried to keep order amid the chaos, distracting the most boisterous students with questions about their future plans, quieting others with a “shoosh” or a look. Most of the time, though, she laughed with them.

Then, with the shrill “brrrring” of the school bell, Smith watched from her desk as her kids grabbed their backpacks and flooded into the hallway.

The room was suddenly quiet.

“They kept me laughing even on the worst days,” Smith said after all the students had gone. “You can’t ask for more than that.”

It took almost 10 months for Smith to get to this point.: the last day of school. Her last day as a first-year teacher.

‘My babies’

Smith entered Lewiston Middle School as an eighth-grade English teacher last August.

The 22-year-old Bates College graduate had dreamed of teaching in a middle school since she was a teenager. She wanted to motivate kids, engage them, lead them in spirited discussions.

But she was nervous, too.

When she stepped into her first classroom last August, the kids seemed so quiet.

It didn’t last long.

“Remember how I said they were quiet the first day?” she said Wednesday with a smile. “Yeah; no.”

Throughout the year she reveled in their energy. She shared their jokes and their poems. She admired their spirits and delighted in their creativity.

After nearly 10 months, she got to know who was shy, who wanted attention, who needed someone to listen.

On the last day of school, after hours of games and jokes and practice for that night’s eighth-grade promotion ceremony, she called the students “my babies.”

“They know that I’ll miss them. They know that I’m super attached,” she said.

Last March, that attachment wasn’t enough to compensate for the stress she was facing.

A creative teacher who never felt organized enough, Smith became overwhelmed by the requirements of the job- including the numerous student assessments she had to give. She had some support but felt alone sometimes, too. She was stressed and often felt “clueless” about the things she was supposed to do.

Smith toyed with the idea of leaving Lewiston Middle School at the end of the year. She considered getting a new job that would allow her to work one on one with teens.

By May, she had decided to stay.

She was making more friends. She was getting excited about projects she wanted to start next fall. And then there were her kids.

“I don’t think I’ll be here forever. But right now it’s where I want to be,” she said.

Nagging doubts

Smith got to know all of her students during the year, but she wondered whether she could have done more.

Did she teach them all she could? Did she get to know them as well as she could? Did she miss connecting with one of the quiet students because she was spending so much time dealing with the boisterous ones?

Said Smith, “It kind of bugs me because I would have been that kid that just gets passed through. Quiet.”

But even as she worried about her soon-to-graduate eighth-graders, Smith knew she wouldn’t fret for long.

She was already learning to use the laptop computer the state had given her for next year’s students. She was planning lessons and structure for 2004.

And in 24 hours, she would meet the students who would be in her homeroom next fall.

“I’m curious to see them,” Smith said.

Her second year of teaching was about to begin.

ltice@sunjournal.com