To Retire or Not To Retire

Because I retired earlier than most, I have become a go-to guy on retirement for others. They ask about what I am doing in retirement (anything I like) and if I like it (I love it). What they are really asking is, should they retire? I can’t answer that question. I can provide some information about my retirement, but I am not sure how much that will help others make a very personal decision. 

I always tell them that my retirement date was pretty much set in 1986 when I started teaching. Of course, I had to choose to retire, but the basic structure of my retirement was built into my job. 

From the moment I started teaching, people were talking about retirement. Most of the teachers at my school were old enough to be my parents when I arrived. It took a few years before there were five or six of us under thirty! We would roll our eyes as these old fogies would go on and on about retirement. It was so far away and we were so tired of hearing about it. During my first decade of teaching, the State of Illinois had a retirement incentive and large numbers of teachers retired. 

A teacher only gets paid for nine or ten months of the year. My wife and I had to stretch our money over summers every year. I believe that summers, both having no classes and having to work within a narrow budget, were great preparation for retirement. We did this for more than thirty years, so by the time retirement rolled around, we knew the drill. 

We also had wonderful retirement mentors. Many of our friends who retired before helped prepare us. They played the role of big siblings and coached us through our final few years. I remember a wonderful drive with a retired teacher. She talked about how, now that she was retired, she was no longer a teacher. She had stopped coaching and her children were grown up, so she wasn’t a coach or a parent, either. Who was she? She asked questions that hadn’t even appeared on my radar. As she shared her experiences, she provided me (and my wife) with plenty to consider as we moved toward retirement. I am happy to help people think through these retirement questions. That may be the best service I can provide. 

Thinking creatively about retirement early is my biggest piece of advice. Diving into retirement without any preparation feels like a belly flop into an unheated pool. Boom and ouch! I made a list of “In retirement, I might…” on my phone.  As I talked to people and went about my day, I made notes about things that I might like to do if I had more time or flexibility. Some were very concrete: take guitar lessons. Some were more a reflection of my working life: have a slower morning. Some were things I could never do on a school schedule: visit my children on their birthdays. I still have this list and I still add to and remove from it. It is not a contract. It is a set of “maybes” and possibilities. 

Just as seniors in high school or college often dislike that, “What are you going to do next year?” question, people peppered me with the “What are your retirement plans?” question. I knew a teacher who answered, “Move my house one inch to the right.” I told people that I was going to take a gap year or two (or more). I gave myself permission to explore, experiment, and see what worked (or didn’t). I had promised myself that I was not going to make any long-term commitments for my first years of retirement. 

I did end up substitute teaching briefly and, although it was nice to be back in the classroom and with my friends, it reinforced to me that I was ready to try other things. I was glad I did it because it validated my desire to go in a new direction. 

Of course, retirement is a financial decision, too. Some of us are lucky enough to have pensions. Some of us have been great planners and have ample retirement savings. Some of us need to figure out how to make ends meet. I met with the great folks at the Illinois Teachers Retirement System, so I knew exactly what my resources would be. 

I am happy to talk about retirement. I am delighted to share my five years of retirement experience. I love being retired – and my circumstances may not apply to everyone. I recommend retirement. I like it. I think many others will like it, too. I fear that there are far too many people who will never get to experience it and that is unfortunate. Don’t write it off. Consider it. Plan for it. Imagine it. Find folks who will help you see what your retirement might be – I am happy to be one of them! 

Twenty Years Ago: October 2003

Twenty years ago this month was a remarkable contrast to my present life. In 2003:

My mornings were hectic and intense. I took my elder child to orchestra at her middle school, ran to my school for a morning meeting with a student club or a parent, and then into my first class. It was a sprint. In retirement, one of the things I enjoy the most is a slow and civilized morning. 

I wrote, “Weekends are NOT a break at all,” and “Days off are never days off.” Now, every day is a weekend and day off! 

I kept my calendar, notes, and contacts on my Palm Pilot and was considering purchasing a Palm Pilot cellular phone! Today, I have all sorts of devices that make that old PDA look like an antique – but I still have it! 

I rode a kind of activity rollercoaster. I wrote that my day could go from highly productive and then, “grinds and collapses.” I was highly dependent on my parents and my wife’s aunt to help fill in childcare. Now, I am spending a lot of time helping my folks. My kids live far away and are highly independent. 

I had an ill and elderly dog that woke us up in the middle of the night, left surprises in the kitchen in the morning, and needed a syringe twice a day. While I no longer own a dog, we enjoy visits from and visits to our daughter’s dog. He is young and active and takes me on a walk – and my daughter takes care of the difficult dog duties.  

My list ran me: “I need to do an oneg and get birthday gifts and all that. A parent meeting this morning after I drop off Q. Field trip numbers today, StageWrite applications. A real bits and pieces day. Nibble, nibble, nibble, nibble.” Now, I use my daily list to give my day structure and I try to keep it short! 

My journal entries were often short. One even ended in midsentence! Now, I enjoy spending time reflecting on the day past and using my journal to help me focus on goals and tasks. My daily journal entries can be a little luxurious. 

Juggled time with family, friends, kids time with their friends, and date night time. Now, my time is flexible and far more balanced. I feel way more in control! 

My children were very young. They were losing teeth, growing physically, and figuring it all out. Now, they are working adults who help me and their grandparents. 

I worked with my children on homework and encouraged them to go beyond just the minimum requirements; “I tried not to hound Q into doing her homework. I played checkers with Jonah while she researched the lightbulb and filled in a math grid. She then read and practiced violin while Jonah set the table and I tried to kill the wasp that had somehow come into the house.” Now, I find I sound like my own grandmother and worry that my children might be working too hard and doing too much! 

“We went to Carmen’s last night and I was stuffed.” Oh, I long for the long-gone pizzeria of bygone days. I love stuffed pizza, but I fear I’ll never have another like Carmen’s! 

I was preparing to be a rabbi-substitute for a bat mitzvah! Our rabbi had just been hired and we had two bat mitzvahs that were scheduled before he was fully on board. So I attended mitzvahs to see how it was done. That role was expanded later: now, it has contracted and I am rarely a rabbi-understudy. 

I was wondering about the internet. When thinking about our school’s annual charity drive, I asked myself, “Can we use the internet to make money for school chest– perhaps send folks to a website?” Amazon wasn’t even a powerhouse yet and buying things on the web was sometimes risky. If only I had pursued this further! 

I was just beginning to see the possibilities of the internet as an extension of the classroom, “I got the idea for an essay tutorial online. I organized it and started it! It is no small project and I will work on it so it is ready for the Humanities kids’ next essay.” I experimented with how kids might use the web both in and out of class. Now, I have a former student running an AI-based educational website! 

I was grading during every free moment. I don’t miss that at all! 

Halloween was a really big deal involving a parade at school, parties, neighborhood gatherings, and of course, the dreaded house-to-house trick or treating. Now, Halloween is no more than greeting the handful of kids who appear at our door. 

While it is interesting to look back, I would not want to go back. These trips into my past journals make me appreciate how much young parents must handle each day. It also emphasizes that twenty years is a very very long time ago. Youth is not wasted on the young; I could not have done what I did today. 

Twenty Years Ago: May 2003

On May 1, 2003, President George W. Bush declared that, in Iraq, our mission had been accomplished and “major combat operations” were over. He was very wrong. 

At that time, I was keenly aware that, as a parent and teacher, not only was my mission not accomplished, but my major operations were only beginning. It is ironic that, twenty years later, many of my missions are accomplished (This is not the place to debate the state of Iraq). I look back at May of 2003 and it is nearly the opposite of my life now. 

My mission at school was in full swing. I had Peer Helping meetings two or three mornings a week. I was preparing for the student performance of creative writing, StageWrite, after school, later in the month. I was getting my Sunday School students ready for their May confirmation, and I was meeting with a new teaching team and designing our class for the fall. I started my adult Hebrew class, too! 

Operations at home were complex and intense. Unlike now, my children lived at home. I moved them from violin to sports practices to the park district to birthday parties and doctor appointments. Oh, yeah, they had school, homework, and Sunday School, too! 

My mother-in-law was at a nursing home in Skokie. My wife visited her frequently. My parents and my wife’s aunt helped us by picking up my kids and taking them for sleepovers and filling in when our babysitter got sick, which happened a lot in May 2003. My wife’s aunt died seven years later, and now I am frequently helping my parents.

Oddly, I didn’t see myself as frenetically busy as I do when I look back. In my journal, I wrote, “Today felt so – reasonable! I don’t remember when I have had a day when I got everything done and I didn’t feel like a madman doing it.”  But I continued, “I taught three classes, got the school work done (I didn’t have grading today – that helps). Web, attendance, special ed forms, calls, reading, and then temple, North Trail, and all the rest – but done and no craziness. What have I forgotten?”  So maybe not so reasonable? Of course, just a day later, I write, “From sane and reasonable to crazy and hectic! The day is only a few hours old and already things are nustybaum.” Are you shaking your head? I am. I was so busy that one of my journal entries ends midsentence as if I was called away and never had a chance to finish it. 

I worked out on my exercise bike most mornings. My body was letting me know that I was stressed: my neck and back hurt. I made my morning workouts more palatable by watching TV shows, but Star Trek: Enterprise had its series finale in May 2003. 

A good metaphor for my life at that time was the way that I organized my students’ debate presentations. Students were in groups of four, debating two on two. It might take ten class sessions if we saw them one at a time, so I found empty classrooms and put cameras in them, and had multiple debates for two or three days. Kids had to report to our room, find their debate room, and then set up and operate the camera, keep time, and debate! I would then take all the recordings home and grade them. It was stressful, intense, and exhausting for me, great for the class schedule and the kids. 

I ran a fundraising road rally for the congregation, which was a mix between a treasure and scavenger hunt. I organized a Mother’s Day brunch for my wife, mother, sister-in-law, and aunt-in-law. My daughter had another wrist x-ray and then we went to the Bakers Square which was demolished this week. My son had an ear infection! We went to the spring play, gymnastics tournaments to watch a former student, and Honors Night. I was a human pinball. 

Much of my free time was filled with grading (and watching those debate recordings). I also started meeting with a group of teachers who team-taught classes. Those meetings meant I was not in my regular classes, which meant sub plans and thus additional work. 

Yet, I read to both kids every night. We had our mornings together, too, even if it meant that when we left the house, it looked like the kitchen had been ransacked by raccoons. We went to dinners at Sweet Tomatoes on a regular basis, which was my children’s favorite restaurant. I rode my bike with my daughter to her school in the morning until she felt comfortable riding by herself. We even had an occasional Saturday babysitter and went to see the movie, Bend It Like Beckham! 

Like today, I was very aware of my good fortune. I wrote, “I am so lucky, so very very very lucky.” Despite a relative’s divorce and my mother-in-law’s condition, the rest of the family worked like a well-oiled Rube Goldberg machine. I noted that I did a “thousand things today,” but I wasn’t overwhelmed or unhappy about it. As with prior months, reading my old journals exhausted me now – but not then. 

I don’t know when we’ll be able to really say, “mission accomplished” in the middle east. It was May of 2003 when the Israeli government approved a plan that they thought would create a two-state system by 2005! 

Looking back lets us shake our heads at the past. It emphasizes how our view then is different from our reality now. Yet, it is our past that formed this present and what will come next. I think that frenetic pace is why I love the quiet and calm of retirement.

Twenty One‘derful Years of Sunday School

I am retiring – again. I have been teaching Confirmation Class on Sunday mornings for twenty-one years. When we started the congregation in 2001, we wanted to be a full-service congregation; that meant a religious school, so I volunteered to teach Confirmation Class. 

We began with the curriculum from our prior congregation. It focused on comparative Judaism and comparative religion. I started with the continuum of Judaism. I took kids to Shabbat services at reform, conservative, reconstructing, and orthodox synagogues –and asked them to come to one of our Friday night services. Of course, high school students (and their parents) have many other things happening on Friday nights or Saturday mornings. And many students had been going to their friends’ mitzvahs at the very same congregations we were visiting. We had some very interesting conversations. 

I told students to dress nicely for these visits as they would for a B Mitzvah. When we visited a conservative synagogue for a Friday night service, one of my students arrived in a very short skirt and a bare midriff. I took off my coat as I saw her come into the sanctuary and said to her, “Put this on, you must be freezing!” I learned to be much more clear about my dress expectations. 

We also studied world religions and visited a Catholic Church and a nearby mosque. Through these seven field trips, the connections between all the religions were increasingly clear to the kids and me – and we were exhausted. It was too many field trips! 

In the third year, I decided to do a little of each: we studied some comparative Judaism and some comparative religion. I organized the years around the structures of the religions – and scheduled all field trips on Sunday mornings! One year, we went to an Orthodox Jewish shul, the Catholic church nearby, an Evangelical megachurch, the local mosque, and a Hindu mandir. The other year, we went to the Unitarian church, a United Church of Christ church, the Buddhist temple, the Bahai House of Worship, and a “classical reform” Jewish congregation that still had Sunday morning services. Five field trips a year was much more reasonable. 

And now, ninety-one kids, eighty-four field trips, and 470 class sessions later, I am handing Confirmation Class over to another teacher. Although I still love learning with students, the structure of Sunday mornings has become too restrictive. Both of my adult(ish) children live and work out of town. If I visit them, our time together must be on weekends. It is too hard to find ways to travel to see my kids and be back on Sunday mornings – and I feel way too guilty missing class. 

It has been a fantastic twenty-one years. I have learned with outstanding students. I have worked with fantastic colleagues and parents. I have talked with remarkable clergy. It has been joyous! 

In the beginning, my own children came to Sunday school with me. They would help set up my classroom and then run off to their own. We rejoined each other for the last half-hour, when the entire school gathered to sing. My parents would come to these music sessions, as would the parents (and often grandparents) of many of the students. It was a gathering of the congregation and a highlight of my week. 

I knew almost all of the families well. Once, as class came to an end, I joked with a student, telling him, “I’m going to tell your parents about this.” He looked at me and replied, “I’m going to tell your parents!” What a beautiful thing that he could! 

Every time we would study a religion or visit a different house of worship, I would learn with the kids. The first time we drove up to the huge megachurch, one of my students leaned over and said, “Oh, Mr. Hirsch, you’ve made a mistake. This is a mall!” Nope. It was a church – and it was bigger than a mall. 

I loved the moment that we drove through the gate at the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir in Bartlet. I showed the kids photos. We had read about Hinduism. But nothing could adequately prepare them for the first sight of that magnificent structure. The collective gasp as we arrived more than made up for the long journey to get there. 

There have been challenging and memorable moments, too: the student who asked our host at the megachurch, “So, are we all going to hell?” The time a guide compared homosexuality to heroin addiction and my students were so flabbergasted that they literally began to move toward her. The pastor who was so approachable that one of my students whispered to me, “These are the coolest Christians I have ever met.” The charming and affable host at the mosque who just didn’t sit down, so we had our half-hour discussion standing (and swaying) on our feet. The host who thought, since he had grown up Jewish, that he was knowledgeable about our religion and made assumptions that were increasingly uncomfortable. The wonderful shofar-making activity at the orthodox shul – and the stuffed goat, and bumping into friends and neighbors at the Catholic church. 

One big issue we discussed a great deal is god. It is a very popular and important topic. We explore different ideas about god and different ways to conceptualize theism. I even show the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, “Who Watches The Watchers” to help us articulate questions and answers about the concept of an anthropomorphic god. 

We didn’t study religion purely academically. The point was to think critically about our own beliefs. We learned about how others answered important religious questions so that we could explore them ourselves. We wrestled with moral dilemmas, talked about what it meant to proselytize, and discussed the line between belief and behavior. The test of belief is how it shows up in our daily lives. How do we walk our talk? How do our beliefs shape our identities and decisions? 

At the conclusion of the two-year class, students get a chance to talk about what they believe. At our confirmation service, they focus on one part of their journey they want to share. Some students talk about god. Some talk about different views of Judaism. Other students focus on some of the questions we asked on our field trips, ethical issues, or their own stories. One young woman started out by telling us that, to her, her mother was god. A young man described his ethical code simply by saying he did his best to “not be an asshole.” Another explored the difference between confirming and conforming. Students sometimes challenged or questioned things they had learned. They wrestled with the concept of what makes something a religion. They described how they navigated conversations about religion with their friends. Year after year, their reflections made me think about my own philosophy and how I could better guide the next group of students. 

It has been a privilege to learn at Kol Hadash’s Sunday School. It has been an honor to study with these students, teachers, and parents. I often said that I am the lucky teacher at the end of the line. I benefited from all the magnificent learning that happened in the classes before Confirmation. From our youngest students learning songs and holidays to studying lifecycle events, heroes, Israel, and wrestling with the Holocaust, students are well prepared for Confirmation Class. I can’t take credit for their brilliance. They have been primed by their families and their earlier classes. I am very proud of them when they stand before the congregation and share their wisdom. 

I am grateful to students with whom I have learned – and their families. Their commitment to Jewish learning is inspiring. I am grateful for the incredible teachers and education directors with whom I have worked – and our outstanding rabbi. For the last three years, I have co-taught Confirmation Class with a teacher who is one of the most able, empathetic, and perceptive educators I have ever met. She will take over Confirmation Class next year. It will be a big upgrade. 

I am only retiring from teaching. I am still very involved in our congregation. I chair our fundraising committee, sing in the choir, and do a variety of other tasks. And if someone needs some help on Sunday morning, I am happy to assist. I live next door, after all.  

When I was a young child, my parents never expected to find a congregation at which they would feel comfortable. When they found Humanistic Judaism, it matched their philosophy and the way they lived their lives. There are so many families like us out there. It gives me such nachas that our congregation and school continues to be a warm and welcoming place for anyone who wants to confirm that Judaism can be celebrated culturally, secularly, non-theistically, and joyfully! 

1000 Days of Retirement: What Keeps You Busy?

Whatever I want. 

I thought about leaving it at that. Seriously, asking people what they are going to do when they retire or what they are doing in retirement is akin to asking what comes next to high school and college seniors. 

Before I retired, I would tell people that I was going to take a gap year and just figure things out. I would also joke that I was going to become a pirate. It is difficult to plan for retirement when one doesn’t know what it will look like. 

And now, 1000 days later, I am still figuring it out. Of the 1000 days since I retired, 720 of them have been during the COVID pandemic. At least once a week, someone says some variation on, “you retired at the right time.” Yes, I did. I deserve no credit for it. 

What have I been doing in retirement? A great deal! However, the big difference is that I am busy without being frenetic. I call it easy busy. One of the best things about retirement is that I get more control of the pace, and I have been trying to slow things down. When I list what I do on a particular day or week, it is much less than in my life when I was working.  That is one of the best things about retirement: it is reasonable.  

I love my slow mornings. As a high school teacher, I awoke at 5:15, did a half-hour workout, put my lunch together, took care of whatever home tasks had to be done in the morning, and got to school in the 7:15 range. Now, I can sleep a little later, although my body is still trained for early rising. My workout is now about an hour long. I take time making a far more interesting breakfast and read my morning feeds. 

After that, my activities fall into a few categories: 

I am getting to things I did not have time to do while I was working. We cleaned the basement during COVID, redecorated my daughter’s room into a new study and media room (which I call my ready room), and began a project of scanning and organizing old photos and documents. I have some plans to do some learning activities once we are less concerned about COVID. 

One of my worries about retirement was that I would become disconnected from my friends, especially those for whom my main connection was school. So I am very purposeful about sending emails, making lunch dates, and keeping in touch. When we were locked down, this turned into more phone and video calls as well as texts and emails. But with or without the pandemic, socializing has become a far greater part of my day-to-day life than it was while I was teaching. 

I am very active in my congregation. I planned our twentieth-anniversary celebration, run the fundraising, and teach in our Sunday school. I used to coordinate the oneg Shabbat food after Friday night services, but we haven’t done that since the pandemic began. However, I am still in charge of announcements. I am delighted to be singing in our choir again! 

I coordinate two science fiction book clubs. I volunteer with the planning of the World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago, which will be on Labor Day weekend downtown.  The pandemic made conventions more challenging. I attended a few virtual cons and have attended two in-person conventions in the last few months. 

I am spending more time and energy with my family. My children came home during the summer of 2020 and I helped with whatever they needed. I was walking my daughter’s dog, fixing meals, helping with technology, and helping my son move to Detroit and drive my daughter back to DC. Speaking of technology, I am the IT help desk for my folks and a few others. 

My family involvement includes more formal family structures. My wife, cousins and I are forming a family council. I have become the bookkeeper for our family's philanthropic activities. My involvement in our family business has increased far beyond what I anticipated. In fact, being more connected to the family business was a bit of a retirement surprise. 

I really really like to read. I have been reading RSS feeds, books, short stories, articles, non-fiction, and lots of other things. I have to be careful or I might read a day (or more) away! 

Before the pandemic, my wife and I would go to live theatre regularly as well. We love to travel and planning our trips took lots of time and energy. These are slowly returning. We have seen some plays at the high school. We went on a trip to California and I am planning trips to be with our kids. The more time I spend on travel planning, the more traveling we can do! 

Oh, yeah, and I grew a beard. 

Yet, when someone asks, “what keeps you busy,” I am at a loss to provide what I think would be a satisfying answer. Now I can just tell them to read this! 

Our Town and Our Old Videos: Glimpses into the Past

My first theatre production at Deerfield High School was Our Town. I did it because we had no money and it would include a large number of students. Recently, I have been looking at old videos and photos from my first decade of teaching. They remind me of Our Town.

A few years ago, Deerfield produced Our Town again. I cried my way through it. Similarly, I watched myself about thirty years ago on these videos. I felt like Emily looking at my very distant life.

I found the play and the videos frighteningly familiar. It happens each time I watch shows I have done, and I am surprised each time. The production is still inside me. The moments, lines, and nuances of the script don’t go away. They lie dormant, even for decades. So do the feelings I had for the people with whom I was working. 

I found, as I watched the videos and show, that I saw more than what was in front of me. I remembered the students from thirty-some years ago and saw them then and now. Thanks to the blessing of Facebook, I am still in touch with many of them.

As Emily returns to her birthday, I was returning to my own Deerfield Grover’s Corners. I didn’t need to die to relive my past. But, like Emily, I was painfully aware of how little I saw then.

During the last years of my career as a teacher, I tried to savor the moments.  Since my own children are growing up and no longer at home, the passage of time feels very real. I savor each phone call, text, and video chat.

When Emily sees her parents young and beautiful, I am filled with gratitude and fear. My parents are aging. They are doing it well, but again I am keenly aware of time. My wife’s parents are gone and, through her, I have a second-hand taste of that loss. And my students are aging, too. Their children were in my classroom.

Some of my former students have died. I can’t get over those losses. When one of those students appeared on one of the videos, it was a jarring and delightful moment. I wish I could go back and share with him what I know now. To paraphrase Mrs. Gibbs from Our Town, I was a blind person.

I watch the videos with wet eyes and wonder: Can we be the people the Stage Manager says don’t exist? Can we cherish and see each other every – every minute? Can we put the minutia and administrivia in its place and hold each other the way Emily tries to as she relives her birthday morning? I fully understand why she can’t go on with it. I had to stop the video a few times because the view became too blurry. It must have been decay from the old VHS tapes.

We do walk through the world in the dark. We don’t see each other. We take each other for granted and forget the miracles we make and live daily. The least important day is important enough.

As I reflect on my time as a teacher, as I review the old videos and memories, I keep coming back to Our Town. I am reminded of those years long ago, and the wonderful people whom I miss. That is the hard part of retirement: missing the wonderful people.

But I am so grateful to have spent time with them – and to have these memories.

Missing Teaching Does Not Mean I Want to Go Back In The Classroom

As I freshly minted graduate, I mean retiree, I miss my old routine. I miss the joys of school. Most of all, I miss the people: my colleagues and students with whom I have learned for most of my life.

While I look back fondly on my life as a teacher, I do not want to go back to the classroom. I could add a “yet” there, but the truth is that I don’t know if I will ever go back. I’m not sure. I certainly do not miss the papers or the politics!

I have relished my summer, which for the first time ever was a real vacation.  I felt free in a way I never have in the past. As the school year starts, I am enjoying finding a new rhythm and finding new ways to learn, share, and contribute. My post-teaching life is still very novel.

People asked me what I was going to do in retirement. Some challenged me saying that they struggled to “fill” their retirements or find purpose. Rather than jumping into a new job or selling the house and moving away, I am giving myself at least one year to explore and find out who I am when I am not teaching. I am calling it my gap year.

The “rules” I have given myself are that I am not going to make any major commitments for about a year. I am not taking another teaching job. I am not taking a long-term substitute position. I am not going to fill my time with busyness just to be busy. I am keeping my hand down - for now.

However, that doesn’t mean that I can’t sign up for classes (I already have) and start projects. That doesn’t mean I am sitting at home; I just don’t want to be as busy as I have been when I was working full time.

Nor do I think I will be bored. I am very good at filling my time; maybe I am too good at it and this is an opportunity to slow down, reflect, and rediscover.

I have a long list of things I want to explore. My “to be read” pile of books is ginormous and my “to be watched” list of movies and TV shows spans decades. I am so fortunate that my wife retired with me. We will explore this together. We want to travel and share our newfound freedom.

Almost everyone has suggestions for me. I should become a travel agent, writer, charity volunteer, college essay consultant, or life cycle officiate. I have lost track of the number of times people have said to me, “You know what you should do…” I am not rejecting all those ideas. I will explore some of them. Right now, however, I don’t want to become something else. I want to really to explore this in-between state and enjoy my new retired status.

I live next door to the school at which I taught for thirty-three years. I hear the bells ring! I see the busses and kids and my colleagues going about life as usual. I do miss it. More so, I miss them. Yet I can miss being a teacher while not wanting to return to the classroom. I helped with the concession stand at a recent football game and I plan to attend other events. I am looking forward to the fall play!

But time runs in only one direction and I cannot go back. So I will continue to blog and photograph and explore  - and share some thoughts here. Don’t mistake my nostalgia for a wish to return. I am on a new path and, thus far, I am relishing it. Keep reading: I’ll keep you up to date!

The Teacher's Nightmare

Most people know the actor’s nightmare: I find myself on stage and I don’t know my lines. Christopher Durang’s play by this title took this idea and made it comic, but to anyone who has experienced this dream, it is not funny.

There is a teacher version of the actor’s nightmare. In this dream, I am struggling with some part of class. In one of my reoccurring nightmares, I leave a classroom and walk down the hall to my next class and then, inexplicably, find myself two miles away near a local forest preserve. I am panicked because there is no way I will get to class on time. In several versions of this dream, it is the first day of school.

Although I retired from teaching several weeks ago, I am having teacher nightmares often. A few nights ago, I dreamed that my classroom had been turned into a cafeteria and I had to find a new room. I couldn’t make signs to put on the doors or tell my students where to go for class. I even dreamed a wonderful set of twins (who just graduated) was trying to help me, but I couldn’t find the new classroom.

I am used to these dreams. They usually come a few days before school starts at the end of summer. Although it may be surprising that a teacher of more than thirty years gets nervous before the first day of school, I often don’t sleep much at all the night before I meet my students for the first time. I get very anxious before school starts!

The first class session sets the tone, so I plan it the way I would stage a play. The first week builds a culture in the classroom, so I make sure that all the pieces are in place long before student names are on a class list. Once I do have a list of students, I memorize their names, make nameplates for their desks, and learn as much about them as the student records system will tell me. I attempt to carefully tailor things to make them feel comfortable and excited to be at school.

Perhaps it is my theatre background or my English teacher disposition: I like control. I am well aware that my control is limited, but when approaching a class, presentation, show, or many other endeavors, I like to get ahead of the curve and prepare as much as possible. Then I am free to adapt to circumstances. Then I don’t have to worry about lesson plans or materials. I can be fully present for the kids.

Of course, as we all know, the best-laid plans gang aft agley (sorry, that’s Scottish. Mr. Burns’ poem says that about mice and men) – go astray. That is part of the plan. My preparations serve as foundations on which I can build learning experiences that work well for my students.

Which brings me to now. My teacher nightmares usually come before meeting new groups in the fall, but it’s summer. They usually signal my anxiety at the start of a new year and acknowledge the importance of getting off the right way with each new class.

I am not teaching now. I will not be teaching high school in the fall. Why am I having teacher nightmares at the beginning of my retirement?

There are things we can plan. There are things we can control. However, when working with children (or most human beings), control and planning are limited. Uncharacteristically, I have chosen to make the beginning of my retirement fairly unplanned. I have given myself the freedom to go slowly and I have been avoiding commitments. While I do have control of my retirement activities, they are not planned like a daily lesson, month-long unit, or the arc of a course. The retired teacher is more unplanned than the working teacher ever was.

And that is scary. The possibilities are scary and exciting. I am teacher and student in this new retirement school. I am not who I was, so I am taking time to get to know the new me. I am changing. The course title is in flux and the content is being written as I go along.

It is exhilarating and powerful. It is the retiree’s joy and the teacher’s nightmare.