Diary of an English Teacher in His Penultimate Year: November 29, 2017

I am feeling under the weather. But I am not so far gone as to have to call in sick. I need to keep resting, continue with my abstinence from adult beverages for a couple more days, try not to worry.

I got some paperwork from the Oregon Public Employee Retirement System, a request for benefit estimates for a possible “ultimate” year, which, possibly, might be next year, hence, the title of this blog series. Even though the years-of-experience ticker on the member website says I won’t be eligible until July of 2020, next year will most def be my 30th year as a public servant in our glorious school system, in one district, in one school the entire time. So I’m a little confused. Because I’ve only been thinking about it in the last couple of years, and only until recently somewhat seriously, I realize there are things I don’t understand.  For example, I don’t know what it means to “buy back” months or years of experience. All I know about that right now is that doing such a thing, “buying back,” would allow me to retire when it seems appropriate that I be able to–after 30 years. I don’t know exactly what or why I’d be “buying back.” And I have no idea how that would influence my bottom line–so I’ve got some work to do. I’m going to fill out this form and ship it off and see what happens.

I’m not ready to stop working. I’m not ready to stop teaching, even. But I think I will be ready after 30 years to at least step away from the high school classroom, or at least, to step back for another perspective, a perspective that is not responsible for all 170 to 200 kids that stream through that classroom door on a quasi-daily basis. I’m gaming to work with adults, or, to work with kids in a completely different way, a way that does not include grading them. You know, if I didn’t have to GRADE human beings and their intellectual output, I could work another decade–maybe. I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating. Teaching is hard. I’ve made to-do lists that were pages long. I did that today. I’ve had this image bouncing around in my head since our last day of staff development right after those conferences I wrote about last time, the image of juggling plates. So today I made a list, not so much a to-do list, but a list of various plates I’m currently juggling. Wanna see?

I am juggling the plates of what seems like a half a dozen new school-wide improvement initiatives: 10/10 attendance, hall sweeps, notebook checks, guardian angels, the Danielson framework, student growth goals and the resultant necessity of gathering data, professional learning cohorts or communities or whatever that letter stands for, and affinity groups, teaching for equity and justice.

I am juggling the plates of 50 essays about a poem by Seamus Heaney, 100 quest narratives and their accompanying reflections, a few dozen late or incomplete final assessments on To Kill A Mockingbird, two letters of recommendation, the supervision of an extended essay on Beowulf from an IB diploma candidate, and some posters featuring the inner workings of the mind of Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own. And I am juggling the plate of a commitment to do work at work and not at home.

I am juggling the plate of a thousand and one meetings: one yesterday across town that I missed, one this morning, one this afternoon, one this evening that I missed, and one tomorrow morning. And while I’m juggling the meeting plates I do not claim that any of these plates should not be in the air, ad nothing to my juggling endeavors, are worthless or meaningless. No, they are all necessary plates to juggle, important plates to juggle, only impossible, with the student work plates and the school improvement plates, impossible to keep in the air.

So I am feeling under the weather. I’m taking medication for high blood pressure. I am writing this and listening to groovy music by George Harrison’s son, Dhani. I am working out some demons. I am trying to put down some of these plates. I am trying to envision a day when I can continue to do meaningful, life-giving work without the feeling that I am, in the words of an old teacher-ed professor of mine, merely an intellectual worker bee. I have sent in an application for a facilitator training program around Courage and Renewal work, which you can read about elsewhere in my blog archives. And I am sending a form to the people at PERS. The future looks bright, I want to say, despite the current darkness. And despite the plate juggling. It’s dangerous but joyous work, this teaching and aging. Onward!