T. S. Eliot said it was April, but he would be wrong. For schoolteachersn, it’s most definitely May.

Some would argue I’ve gone completely off the deep end. That May brings summertime and a stress-and-student-free stretch beneath a benevolent sun.

And some of that is true. School years are tough and summer offers a reprieve. But in teaching, we find ourselves anchored to children for a season of their lives and we become invested in them all, those who flourish and those who flounder.

We love watching the stellar students sail like racing vessels, sleek and smart, seamlessly navigating subject matter. They make teaching an easy, breezy ride, and in these instances, May is a celebration.

And we take pride in working with the ones who struggle to learn the ropes, who make waves and challenge us to batten down the hatches and get creative. When they turn the corner and make up leeway, we cheer them on, and May is a momentous and magical month.

But it’s the other students – the ones caught between the devil and the deep blue sea –the distracted, the detached, the loose canons and the ones taking on water, going under, fighting against the current, or worse, not fighting at all– these students are the ones who make May the cruelest month.

Because these kids live in troubled waters and we feel helpless against their storms. They battle bleak circumstances, hungry bellies, haunted pasts, and their futures are so heavy that many will sink. And in May we find ourselves parting ways before finding a way to get them to safety. We’ve tried. And we’ve failed.

We’ve failed them.

So we watch from the pier as the sun sets on the horizon of another year, praying that somehow, somewhere, someone will find them, reach them, get them out of the raging storms before it’s too late.

Yes, we know we can’t save them all, but the ones that we haven’t saved haunt teacher souls so very, very much in May — and forever more.