Farewell to a Classroom of Young Heroes : School: It’s a bittersweet commencement for a teacher and his polyglot sixth grade.

Today is the last day of the school year. Most teachers rejoice on this day. I don’t. The last day leaves me empty and sad.

At 10:30 this morning, I will slip “Pomp and Circumstance” into the cassette player and, along with teary parents, I will watch my sixth grade graduate and move up to the next rung on the educational ladder.

I will watch Sharona, from Tehran, who was shot at by soldiers as she escaped with her family over the Makran Mountains into Pakistan. I will watch Mayra, who endured the sullen stares of border guards and three days of hunger and thirst as she and her mother rode rickety buses up the twisted spine of Central America. I will watch Vinod, who wrote that what he missed most about his native India was his baby cow, born the day he left.

I will watch Judit, who taught me the Hungarian way to do long division (it’s not as long as ours), and Ahmed, who assured me that there’s no difference between Muslim and Moslem, and Ji Won, who drilled me in Korean, and Tamika, who, sometime in February, stopped using “be” as a linking verb (as in, “He be good.”), and Yoni, from Tel Aviv, who returned from his first recess and said to me, “Why do you call it a bathroom? There’s no bath in it.”

And I will watch Arman, a violin virtuoso from Moscow who, when I asked him about corporal punishment in Russian schools, said he didn’t have to worry about being struck on the knuckles with a ruler because “they never hit the musicians.”

I will watch these children of housekeepers and seamstresses and store clerks and chefs, these children of Managua and Sonora and Yerevan and Budapest, children who, at the age of 6 or 7 or 8, were ripped from their villages and towns, ripped from all they knew.

I will watch these children, so many of whom have known few of the joys and little of the security of childhood, children forced by the demands of their new country to become parents to their own parents (translating, explaining the customs, the laws, the school system), children who, in the afternoons, walked (or ran?) through grimy, gang-governed neighborhoods and who, upon arriving home, unlocked and relocked the deadbolts and plopped into frayed armchairs in darkened corners of empty apartments where they were kept company by Oprah and Phil and Geraldo.

At night, my students have told me, they sat down wherever they could clear a space and began their homework--multiplying fractions, conjugating irregular verbs, reading about the Greek gods, memorizing a Robert Frost poem. And as they worked, they tuned out the TV and the crying baby and the freeway roar and the cursing drunks and the bottles smashing against the pavement.

The trials these 12-year-olds have faced--and will continue to face--are daunting. “So many problems,” one girl sighed when I asked her one day why she looked so upset. But, amazingly, this kind of resignation was the exception. Most days these kids were able, somehow, to close the compartments of their minds where lurked thoughts of poverty and racism and longing. Most days they came to schools with their work done and their hair combed and their curiosity intact. Most days they even laughed at my jokes.

Around 12:30 this afternoon, after the last of the students has clutched his diploma, after the last bus has belched away, my classroom, once a scene of laughter and learning and tears and tunes and dispute and unanimity, my classroom will be eerily quiet.

I will miss my young heroes and heroines, because that is what they are. In a country crazed with violence, in a country whose elected leaders have all but abandoned them, these children have risen above their circumstances and performed heroically. They have noble qualities, all of them. Their accomplishments made me feel exalted.

As this afternoon heats up, and as the voices on the playground fade, I will clean up my classroom. The crumpled note I will find in a desk, the lunch ticket I will spy on the floor of the coatroom will pain me like effects left by a departed lover.

My kids will have moved on. I will miss sharing in their struggle. I will miss being their teacher and their friend. I will stay behind in a bare room where the walls seem to whisper of my mortality.