Musings on Retiring from Teaching

June 28, 1015.

Retirement. Well, almost. Tomorrow, the required “admin day,” beginning with the year-end staff breakfast, followed by a meeting I plan not to attend, and emptying, completely emptying, my classroom.

John and I were talking today about this:

Being a teacher infuses one’s entire identity. Every child out in public, we assess for classroom behaviour. Every movie, every article, every YouTube video we watch, we’re thinking, could this be useful, how could we build a lesson, a unit, a year around the theme. We collect things: drums and bells and little wooden frog sound-makers from a street vendor in Avignon; picture books and young-adult novels; bookmarks and bubble-wrap (they love that stuff as “gotcha” prizes.) We research constantly, learning curriculum well beyond what students need to know, so that we can answer the question: “How do we know that?”

So what do you do when you can stop, have to stop, doing all that? Everything you’ve been doing has had relevance; when you did something, the kids responded, the parents responded, your colleagues or the administration responded. You’ve been in the public eye, and though that’s been a tremendous strain, sleep-depriving stress, you’ve also thrived on it, it drove you. It’s been decades of incredible creative output, a constant turn on of the imagination, and now, well, you don’t have to do that any more.

The blessing and the curse of teaching is that you make a difference, probably a smaller one that we like to think, but a difference, nevertheless. How many careers afford that gift – the one wish of any caring human being?

John says he feels irrelevant. That’s the curse part. But I said, you’re not irrelevant to me, you’re not irrelevant to Kieran. You are the world to your grandson!

And that’s it, I suppose. Retirement from teaching is a shift from the larger public acknowledgement of skill to the smaller family appreciation of love and care and connectedness. Who can say which makes the bigger difference, after all?

When I was teaching music, I had it down. I knew, after 17 years, exactly what I needed to do to get the result I wanted. Every day was a gruelling five-hour performance, but after my five hours, there wasn’t a lot of extra work to do. That’s when my writing flourished and my creativity blossomed. Once I moved into the classroom eight years ago, every ounce of my creativity went into teaching, not for five hours a day, but for eight, nine, ten hours a day, plus several hours on weekends. I loved it, but my writing died, and my fledging attempts at watercolour ceased. That was alright with me, because I took so much pleasure in the creation of lessons, units, themes, and in the spontaneous nature of the work that would take me and my thirty students off into wonderful, passionate tangents.

But now, I won’t have that. I will have time. I will have energy (I am so tired!) I can’t wait to see what emerges!

I have promised myself to create every day, whether it’s some words like this on the page, a poem, some knitting, a drawing or painting, or a special meal. Who knows, maybe I’ll even make music! And planting a garden counts! The raging river of creativity that has been the daily necessity of my life will continue still. This will be my time to blossom, not for the public, not for acknowledgement, but for myself, for those that love me, for the fulfillment of my lifelong dreams.

Let it begin!