Letter to a Retiring Teacher
You are already singling out the golden days to hang in your memory – the days when smart, attentive kids in a great class would delight you with their genuine enthusiasm for learning and ability to achieve. When the topic arises, you mostly recall the gems who got your jokes, who pulled up those around them, led classroom discussions and never failed to turn in a homework assignment. There have been many like that who have gone on and made you proud of their success. Sometimes they come back to share a hug. What a joy!
Every student has special needs, that’s why they’re kids. You looked after them all with endless patience and grace. You taught by explaining and re-explaining their daily lessons, told them stories, shared your values and virtues, all the while dealing with difficult parents, missing homework, head lice, schoolyard bullying (real and imagined), endless distractions like the rise of the electronic screen addiction, “mean girl syndrome,” wannabe gang boys, petty politics – petulance, flatulence, and lost lunch money.
You’ve held on to some particularly antiquated teaching skills that today seem devalued by just about everyone: Like insisting that each morning each child will enter the classroom by stopping and saying in a loud, cheerful voice, ‘Good morning, Mrs. S.'”
Somehow you, and others of your ilk knew it was a mistake to de-emphasize instruction in cursive writing, grammar, spelling, music, science, social studies, mandatory daily recess and compulsory physical education. Through the years you gave your students the chance to learn a few useful things even though the geniuses downtown insisted that taking more tests was the only sure way to solve America’s demonstrable decline in important educational measurements.
You quietly fought their oddly inverted notions about almost everything and the foolish dogma that if the total minutes of teaching time in the school day could be sliced just a little thinner the test scores would surely explode. Thank you for the furtive moments you allowed yourself to actually read aloud a story to your class, which, any fool will tell you, is the essence of the art of teaching and a place where genuine learning takes place on many levels. John Steinbeck said it best, “I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. It might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.”
By rough count, you’ve directly taught more than 650 third and fourth-grade students and have touched the lives of many hundreds more. Thank you for giving much more than the prescribed eight hours of work each day because that is what’s required to do the job properly. And thank you for the many, many more hours spent on school nights and weekends at the kitchen table grading papers, writing lesson plans, howling at the moon, emailing parents, shouting unteacherly things at that cheap school-issued laptop, posting grades, parsing evaluations. “Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.” (Jacques Barzun) Boy isn’t that the truth? What a grand and artful thing it is to share with someone else something you know. Something they need to know. And you know that they need to know. That’s why you’re a teacher, a “Guerilla Teacher,” sneaking up and implanting germs of knowledge in spite of the rules.
Twenty-one years might seem an incomplete career, but remember it is really your fourth career – figure it this way:
First career-Teacher for a year and a half fresh out of Colorado State University in 1970-71 until the jobs simply dried up in Colorado,
Second career-Chasing secretarial jobs all over the country while supporting someone else’s employment choices,
Third career-Stay at home mom for 10-years,
Fourth career-Teacher, fourth grade (and third and fifth) at Forkner Elementary from 1997 until today. Had you been teaching all along, it would represent a forty-eight-year career. Still, you started out a teacher and you ended up a teacher, and that’s something.
So now the final bell is about to ring – or buzz, or whatever. It’s time to retire. You gave all you had to those lucky 650 kids, but the learning curve to become today’s all digital new techno-teacher is too steep. Yes, your mastery of whiteboards and workarounds for on-line testing are laudable, you’ve put up a pretty good front, but really, art is not science and they lost you and your crowd back at MS-DOS.
Back in 1971 your future as a teacher seemed to stretch beyond the horizon; just as the first day of each new school year and the promise each morning when every fourth grader looks you in the eye and says, “Good morning.” You have taught them that much and a bit more. At the end of the day and the end of your career, you may be certain that you have made a difference in the lives of those Americans. You should be proud and content and satisfied. The silence will be startling but you’ll grow accustomed. You deserve it, a retirement fully earned. And the blessing of friends, like Mrs. C., I’m pretty sure everything I said about you is true about her. That’s why you’re partners.