It’s the end of the school year, and every three years it gets particularly emotional for me, having a graduating eighth grade homebase. These students (many of them) first walked into my classroom three years ago in late August, brand new middle schoolers with their nervous parents at a respectable middle school distance, ahead or behind. They looked around my classroom and set down their supplies, and read my posters (one immediately recognized the grammar poster from The Oatmeal), and told me about their favorite sports and their favorite subjects…and their least favorite parts of school, too. We became the Hoolecopters (a name that won out over the Hooters, which is an adorable name for a group of sixth graders and something else entirely when they are eighth graders).

On the first day of school, I marked their height on my wall, and even though I’ve moved to a new space this past year with my new job as reading interventionist, I was able to take our height tape with us and take their pictures this spring with a measure of their physical growth. The pictures can’t really show all the other growth that I’ve witnessed along their path from little kids to incredible teenagers.

Anyway, I’ve been working with trying out some new poetry formats, which I’ve been stealing from The Poetry Princesses, and this form, the raccontino, seemed perfect for saying goodbye to my eighth graders. The poem is written in couplets, with the even-numbered lines all rhyming. Immediately I thought of the word “years” because of the time we’ve spent together, and I quickly thought of a couple of rhymes — sure, they’re facing fears, crying tears, I can do this. Easy.

The next feature of the poem is that the title plus the final word in the odd-numbered lines tells a story or makes a statement. That was simple, I thought. The sentence will be, “You will go far!” Or something like that. Now I just had to write the poem, but every time I tried, it just ended up being this sentimental mess! Ha! That’s so not me, even if it’s true to life at this particular moment. I’ve restarted and rewritten every line in this poem at least five times, and I’m still not sure it says what I want it to say, but after all, that’s the whole question of the poem — what could I possibly say to these twenty-five young people heading off to high school except that I want them to hope.

(And that I hope they find someone at their new school to check in with them each day, and that maybe they would also BE that check in for someone else.)

So here’s a raccontino, possibly (there was also a syllable requirement, which I ignored, because words are difficult!), and we’ll call it a rough fifth draft.