It is back to school season once again in Merced. Today is the second day that students are back in school. Even though it is August, many students will not report until after the first week of September. Classes are filled to the brim. Some students will start the year sitting on the floor. There ware some nostalgia pieces. Merced finally has a new school that will open up to all of its 9-12th grades. There are no more portables in the two other in town schools. Faculty has been reasigned and students are no longer Cougars or Bears they could also be Gauchos.
I will have to admit that there are some feelings of disconnect. After a career of 35 years in the public schools as a speech and language Specialist I know that this is the time of the year that caseloads are examined. Schedules are made. Contacts with the students are established and established from over the Summer break. There is a myriad of things that need to be done to get the school year on the road.
It just doesn't happen when you are retired. Many retirees use this time to travel. One of my retired friends is off doing a Great Britain-Scandinavian cruise. Looks like they are having a great time.
Some of my working friends look at me in envious manner as their next school day is tomorrow. They are onstage with a couple of dozen (at least) eyes on their every move. They have some concerns regarding Common Core, the latest of an era after era of marching reforms that education will have to endure. No profession is so vulnerable to public scrutiny as public education. It is so easy to think that education would be better if it did xxxx model. We have lived through many of these. The principal administrators that foist these great visions soon move on and the district is left in the dust by good intentions and usually not enough money to see the plan through. Thirty plus years of being messaged into one plan or another is enough. It still gets right down to what retires miss about teaching... the student and the teacher. The teacher brings some content and a methodology for thinking and learning and the student brings a willingness to take this and think and act and learn in a new way. When it works, which it almost always does, there is nothing more rewarding to the teacher than to see this happen.
Teachers have to revitalize themselves and challenge the way they teach at least every five years. They need to be adding something new, recreating their teaching methods or develop something that will challenge them in the classroom. There has been no way that the school as a institution has been successful in developing this in teacher. The last contract that I negotiated had provisions for professional development included. This is a start... but really the answer is deep inside the teacher It has to come from within and it there has to be some realization and check points to discover that it is personally necessary.
I think that what I miss most is the interaction with my colleagues. Even though they may be working in different content areas, and this job is decidedly solitary, there is nothing like adult interaction that makes the day complete. Sometimes reform objectives isolate rather than consolidate peer thinking. Many of my colleagues have retired too. Just going back to teach would not bring back the peers and fun that we had being on the staff of a high school campus. We have been replaced by a new crop of teachers that have different expectations of their students and their job. You cannot go home... although some teachers try to do this through substitute teacher. Some need to do it to survive.
I do not miss having to find a place to work each year. Except for the last two years of my career I had to find a place to work to see pull out kids. This was often on the benches outside of their classrooms. Testing materials were always problematic. There was little support for professional conferences. If you happened to go to a conference, you were channeled all the students that could be diagnosed with the conference's them for the next couple of years.
So yes, I feel the prangs of not going to work... my life's work. But no, I do not miss the challenges of educational reform and the logistics of the job especially this time of the year.