So for the next few months things will be different.  Summers around Cleveland are typically quiet. People like to hunt, fish, and ride their four wheelers.  None of that really appeals to me.  And with Delta State mostly dormant (aside from TFA and summer school) there is not much to do.  With the hot weather not far away, there isn’t much I would want to do outside anyway.

All the same there are a few things to which to look forward.  Last Tuesday Keep Cleveland Boring held a Cinco de Mayo pub crawl which attracted a fair amount of people.  The Cleveland-Bolivar Young Professionals has held a kickball tournament in June for the last two years.  Of course there is Memorial Day and the Fourth of July.  I’ll also be travelling back home in August. So its not like I’ll be sitting around doing nothing.  But being on a twelve month contract (as opposed to the nine month ones most faculty have) does set me apart from many people around here.  When you work through the year, summer is just another season.

Graduation, as you might have guessed, has got me thinking about transitions.  It has been two years since I moved here.  Already someone who started when I did has moved onto another job. Currently I have no plans to do so.   But for many people Cleveland is only a stop over on the road to bigger and better things.  You see it in the students who pass through and in the TFA Corps members who come here for a few years at a time.  Even faculty members don’t always stay for the long haul.

Speaking of transitions, this blog will soon be undergoing one of its own.  After two years, I feel the time is right for an overhaul.  The content will still be the same, as will the address.  However I will be considering a different design and perhaps a different hosting platform.  Stay tuned for more news and feel free to leave a comment below if there is something you wish to see me do or implement.

Being on the other side of the isle, so to speak, felt different.  This year marks the first time I attended a graduation ceremony as a faculty member.  It won’t be my last and for that reason was not the same.  Being a librarian my perspective is different than teaching faculty.  These aren’t my students specifically.  So it was perhaps less emotional for me.  All the same it’s hard to imagine I was in that line only a year and a half ago. Commencement really does drive home that I have achieved something real and started a new chapter in my life.

A few things stand out.  At the end of the ceremony all of the faculty lined up on either side of the aisle.  The students then marched between us and out the door.  Problem was a lot of them decided to reach out and hug their favorite professor.  What was supposed to be a neat recessional thus broke down and took longer than necessary.  No wonder SUNY Albany didn’t do that.

I also learned that Delta State students don’t have the opportunity to buy their regalia. Whether any of them care is beyond me, but I doubt it.  Quite a few people didn’t even walk so their minds are probably elsewhere.  But I like to hang on to things and would not have been happy if the choice to buy hadn’t been there for me.  Evidently there is one company which provides regalia for the entire state, even high schools. However only faculty members have the option to buy graduation regalia.  These sorts of arrangements seem to be common in Mississippi.  For one reason or another the educational institutions in the state seem to act as a group and purchase goods and services from the same companies.

Ultimately for me this was just another event.  It was an important one of course, but did not have the same significance as when I was a student.  Part of the reason is that I’m on a 12 month contract so the summer is just a time for more work and the library is deep into its preparations for the arrival of Teach for America’s Summer Institute in June.  Yesterday could be the first of 30 or more graduations for me.  I’m not trying to degrade the importance of it only to try and capture how different the event was for me as a faculty member.  Nevertheless summer is here.  Delta State, outside the library, is going into vacation mode. There’s budgets to compile, projects to work on, and preparations to be made.   Like all such things May 10th, 2014 was both an end and a beginning.