LESSONS LEARNED
Requiem for Room 215
The sights, sounds, and smells didn’t die when the wrecking ball arrived
I walked into Room 215 a neophyte, about two decades removed from my own high school experience. I was known as a “Career-Switcher” — school district lingo for one whose skills in the private sector are solid enough to wrangle high school kids.
I said goodbye to teaching 23 years later, proud to have taught a few children well with the support of my venue — a simple, cinder block classroom.
Room 215 helped me keep a group of more than two dozen 17-year-olds calm the morning of September 11, 2001.
No one knew where Flight 93 was headed and our suburban D.C. high school — 11 miles from the Pentagon — was on lockdown.
My classroom also enabled an assembly of grief-stricken kids to keep it together following alum Leslie Sherman’s death in the Virginia Tech Massacre; encouraged another group to celebrate the accomplishments of a classmate who perished unexpectedly; joined in to lament the deaths of teachers, the overdoses of friends and the passing of parents.
Room 215 was more than a place I taught kids what to read…
