Life goes on
The older you get, the more decisions you have to make. The older you get the more those decisions have an impact on the direction your life will go. I left my 30’s with the decision to leave my life as an apartment dweller and buy a house, found a woman to share it with and marry, and leave my classroom teaching position for a job as a district-wide computer support teacher. Included in a list of the topmost stressful things in a person’s life are buying or moving to a home, getting married, and getting a new job. By the time I had turned 40 I had hit the trifecta.
The interesting thing about leaving the classroom environment and not being responsible for report cards, parent conferences, planning the day-to-day curriculum, and dealing with student issues, is that your stress level decreases. Until you leave the classroom, you may not even notice that you were stressed. As a computer support teacher, I was still working with students and teachers but a lot of the pressures of being a classroom teacher were not there. Any physical issues I had had due to stress, were resolved.
Being out of the classroom was also somewhat reaffirming for me as I got to see a lot of other teachers teach and discovered that my teaching style when I had my own class was okay and in fact, sometimes even better than others (and worse at times, but not to the extent I had imagined). This knowledge reduced most of the stress I might have unknowingly felt.
The new teaching position I had was eliminated after 5 years and also coincided with the birth of our son, David. So it was back to the classroom for another 4 years before I was again taken out of the classroom for 3 years to be the district-wide elementary teacher of the gifted and talented. Following the demise of that position, I was back in the classroom for my final 6 years of teaching as a classroom teacher.
When a district offers you 100% family medical insurance for life, provided you take their retirement incentive the year you are first eligible, you take it. After all, I was only 55 and hoped to be able to get work elsewhere to supplement my income. Though there was concern about leaving a steady job that had pay increases every year, it was decided that the unknown increase in insurance costs moving forward would make the retirement deal worth the risk. Besides, the age of new mandated curriculum and standards was beginning to make its way into teaching and I was getting stressed again. It was time to move on. Unlike a number of my colleagues that had retired, I chose not to go back into the district and substitute teach.
Retirement gave me the opportunity to do other work. I spent one semester as a supervisor to student teachers through Dowling College.
I was always into technology during my teaching career and I had just received an advanced certificate in Educational technology from Stony Brook when I was hired for a part-time job with BOCES Model Schools program as an Educational Technology Integration specialist. BOCES considered us part-timers casual employees.
Retirement also gave me time to explore other interests that I had been practicing while I was teaching – storytelling and writing. As a storyteller, I began getting paid jobs performing at schools and libraries. My writing took a turn from writing a journal of strictly school-related reflections to writing in all different genres and styles. My writing audience increased from just myself to the world as I created a Blog that continues today. I have posted 456 pieces of writing on my blog since I created it on December 3, 2006, and as of March 27, 2021, my writing has had 15,284 views of that writing.
In 2013, as my BOCES work began to decrease, due to Model School’s recruitment of younger part-time teachers for lower pay, I returned to teaching in the district I had worked in for 33 years and began to substitute teach. This again gave me an opportunity to work with students and teachers and practice a lot of my storytelling. Because of my knowledge of the district, the teachers, technology, and my rapport with students I was welcomed back. One administrator even labeled me a Super-Sub.
Of course, all this came crashing to a halt in March of 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and closed everything.
On some positive notes, reaching the age when my eligibility to take the full benefit of Social Security this past September mitigated some of my income loss and being part of the Worldwide Virtual Storytelling Guild, introduced me internationally to a world of storytellers.
Looking back, there were many events and memories that I could have written about. Life with my wife, Christina, and places we’ve been to and adventures we had; being part of David growing up, his leaving home for college, and meeting the woman he was destined to marry, and becoming friends with her family; and interactions with my own family, including finding and meeting a half-brother that I had in France that we only guessed existed, to mention a few. But those stories are for another day.
At some point, Christina will retire as a scientist and I’m sure our lives will continue in a different direction, forging new paths and stories. To adapt a title from a Dr. Seuss book, “Oh the places we’ll go.”
