I'm Retiring (Again)

It’s official, y’all.  I’m retiring (for the third time) at the end of the year.  On May 28, 2032, I’m calling it quits.
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I know, I know, you’ve heard it before and probably don’t believe me anymore.  I retired in 2006 and again in 2023 and ended up back at it both times shortly after.  So your skepticism makes sense.

On top of that, the last several years have brought all the changes I hoped for - and then some.  All the progress in that time really does make this a difficult decision, I have to admit.

To be honest, I’m surprised I made it this far.  20-21 (“the Zoom Year”) was such a hard school year, but as crazy as it was, I saw so much promise in what the future could hold that I wrote my first widely shared blog post - I Hope School Never Goes Back to Normal. I thought that year of upheaval was exactly what we needed to change what had needed to change for decades.  I was hopeful.  Tired, overworked, and not mentally well, but hopeful.

Then in 21-22, we did the opposite of what I hoped, as I assumed we would, and went directly back to normal. And it was awful. For everybody.  Teachers were miserable.  Kids were miserable.  Administrators were miserable.  Parents were screaming at school boards.  Everybody was so angry and unhappy.  
  
Do you remember all that?

That was also the time of “The Great Resignation” in the United States.  Anybody and everybody was changing when, how, and where they worked. Remote.  Family-friendly hours.  Flexibility.  Reasonable workloads.  It was so exciting!  Teachers started talking about joining in the exodus.  There were articles upon articles upon more articles about teachers thinking of getting in on the “The Great Resignation.”  Administrators, too.

Which of course they didn’t end up following through on.

Yet.

“Give us one more year to get back on track,” educational leaders pleaded.  Pay raises of a few thousand dollars were added for the 22-23 school year to try and keep people working in schools.  Promises were made that the next year would be so much better than 21-22 had been.  “We’ll be another year separated from the pandemic,” they encouraged, as though the problems had been caused by, rather than simply accelerated by the Covid lockdowns.  “We have big plans” to get things back on track, they assured us.  

And of course, there were no plans, as we all remember.  22-23 started just as the prior year had ended.  Nothing was different.  We just showed up and hoped that the next year would be better just because it was the next year.

Again.

And it wasn’t.

Again.

THAT'S when everybody quit. 

A lot of them didn’t even make it to Thanksgiving.  

Classes ballooned to 40, 50 or more for those of us who stayed.  We just stuck them on software programs most of the day since there were too many to teach.  Plenty of parents simply stopped sending their kids to school all together.  And who could blame them?  It was chaos.

At least we were honest after that.  In 23-24, the message was basically “we can stick them on software programs here at school if you need day care, or you can have them do it at home.  We’re sorry it has come to this, but we don’t have any other options.”

I retired for the second time and didn’t teach that year.  I spent June through December visiting National Parks and old friends.  And when I decided to start looking for a job at the beginning of 2024, wow was it exciting.  Former teachers were in incredibly high demand in the business world.  So much had changed because of the Great Resignation that the demand for people with expertise in teaching and training was hard to keep up with.  Everywhere I looked, there were six-figure salaries and four-day work weeks for people who could teach and train others.  Not to mention the private school and “pod-schooling” boom.  The opportunities to teach in those environments were limitless with all the families who moved their children into them.

In spectacularly foolish form, I put aside all of those lucrative opportunities and… filed to run for a spot on the school board that November.  Foolish is probably the wrong word.  Even though I got blown out in the election, I did enjoy the process, I learned a lot, and it turned out that even though my ideas were spectacularly unpopular with voters, they were heard by and resonated with the higher-ups of the district who were actually trying to rebuild the schools after all the mess of the last few years.

So in January of 2025 I started working with them to dream up what was next.  Since everything had fallen apart, it was pretty exciting to think about building the education system from scratch.  We networked with others who worked in learning, information, and child development, like the library system and the day care system (how did we not think of that earlier?).  I got to travel to Norway and Singapore and Israel and places that had dealt with these problems decades ago.

And we made a plan to get started.

Yes, we had a lot of advantages in getting the plan off the ground.  I’m willing to admit that.  There were way fewer kids still in school at the time.  We had a bunch of extra money since there had been so many unfilled vacancies not collecting salaries for the last several years.  There was a lot of support from kids and parents because anything had to be better than the mostly-software-school they’d been dealing with for two and half years.  The familieswho stayed were very committed to making things better.

As much as I like to bemoan how long it took us to finally build schools that made sense for our society, I’m sure we couldn’t have pulled it off sooner.  It would have just been one more thing to scream at the school board about, blame on the other political party, and complain “that wasn’t what it was like for me in my day so we shouldn’t do it now either” about.  

But at the start of the 25-26 school year, we were finally ready to try.

Looking back, can you even remember some of the things we were doing before?  Teachers’ schedules that had 2-4 hours of planning time per week for 30-some hours of teaching?  Making the school day for kids six hours long even though all of their parents worked way longer than that?  Making every kid take all the same classes and learn at the same time, at the same pace, and in the same way for 13 years?  Calling things like the arts, managing emotions, and physical activity “extracurricular”?  Standardizing everything?  Kids constantly moving from teacher to teacher who barely had time to get to know them?  Allowing middle and high schoolers to bring devices to school that had literally been engineered to distract and misinform them?  Assigning one “grade” at the end of a course that supposedly summarized 4-5 months worth of learning?  Only allowing students to pursue strengths and interests if they transferred to specialized schools?  And special education!  Do you remember that we had “special education”?  And we thought that only certain students needed any kind of special or customized education?  

It’s a wonder that lasted as long as it did.  It seems crazy to look back at the year we locked down for Covid and remember how badly everyone wanted to get back to that.  To that.

Better late than never, I suppose.  It’s been a joy to watch kids gradually come back to school since then.  I’m especially happy for the ones who never left.  I’m so glad their endurance finally paid off. 

It sure was clumsy getting this thing figured out for the first few years, too. The flexible hours and figuring out how to space things out for the kids who stayed for different amounts of time.  Getting the customization down.  Reporting specific learning accomplishments, gaps, and next steps instead of “grades.”  Mentoring the same kids for longer periods of time.

But I was always one for change, so I enjoyed those formative years.  And in fact seeing it pretty well dialed in now is part of the reason I’m retiring again. I used to work so hard because I knew the system wasn’t enough and that I had to give so much more to the kids for them to have the opportunities they deserved.

But now I don’t. 

Now they all get the best.

So I’m ready to let go of it.

I’m sure you’ll note the irony of the retirement date - May 28, 2032.  An homage to back when we had the 10-month-on-2-month-off school year that made sense only for children of farmers (or teachers).  But hey, cut me some slack. I did it on that schedule for a long time, so the Friday before Memorial Day is still one of those special days for me every year.

A day that signifies an ending.

So that’s the day.

May 28, 2032.

The third time’s a charm, they say.  Maybe it’ll stick this time.

And I’d appreciate your vote for school board on November 2nd.  Don’t make me wait for the third time to be a charm for that, too.



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