One Year Later

Reflections on Teaching After Retiring

I have been a teacher my whole adult life—and arguably, my whole life. Even as a little girl, I was already arranging my dolls and action figures into classrooms of my own making. I had the Bionic Woman, AKA Jamie Sommers, who looked like an ordinary schoolteacher but had superhuman hearing, speed, and power hidden beneath an unassuming exterior. I also had Princess Leia, who radiated main character energy as an advocate for justice and freedom. I loved sharing what I knew with them, whether it was careful cursive or phonics lessons repeated from school. Later, I learned teaching was a two-way street, and there was never a moment when I could definitively say the lesson was over. The work was infinite. But so was the learning.

During the 34 years that I was in the classroom, I encountered many personalities. Sometimes they even began to blend together. But there will always be students who stand out. It’s not necessarily the loud ones or the challenging ones. Sometimes it was the DACA students who came back for me to write letters for them. And sometimes it was the ones I only taught for a few weeks or months.

One particular student that came and went was a houseless student. He stayed in a crumbling motel with his mother, who, he told me, held signs for a living. Pete was imaginative, funny, and a gifted writer, with a distinctive twang to his voice. A staff member bought him a pair of expensive shoes, but he didn’t keep them long—there were other needs. I gave him a journal and a flair pen instead. He wrote in it every day. One morning, he announced his mother was pregnant. Someone asked, “How did that happen?” He replied, “Dunno. My mom said it’s one of those things that happens once in a blue moon.” Pete didn’t stay long; his family eventually moved away. But I won’t forget him or the vivid stories he told.

And then there were the lessons that came not from individuals, but from the systems students were growing up inside of. Over the years, I watched how they responded to lockdown drills—something that even didn’t exist when I began teaching in 1993. The first wave of students after Columbine whimpered and clung to one another, and I had to steady them while wanting to do the same. Later generations, raised in that reality, lay quietly under desks, calm and practiced. Protocols changed over the years as we learned from the collective tragedies of others.

In that world of careful responses, there were moments of childlike logic with startling clarity. I’ll never forget one unassuming student, Michelle, who left homeroom for reading intervention and then a drill occurred. She returned unfazed and told me she’d hidden in the hallway bathroom. “I thought it would be safer to jump onto the toilet with the door closed. You know, so the bad guy wouldn’t find me,” she said with a shrug. She was eight.

And then there were the Amandas, like the one in my first year of teaching who broke into tears one chaotic day. I asked her why she was crying, and she said in between sobs, “I’m sad that no one is listening to you.” Suddenly, the others quieted down, hearing her speak. A beacon of light, she told them they needed to be better. They listened to her.

Even after retiring from teaching full time, the lessons never cease. The work remains infinite, and the stories are etched in my mind. Michelle—the Bionic Woman, leaping to safety—and Amanda, with her Princess Leia-like intuition and quiet leadership, are still out there. And Pete, somewhere with a pen in his hand, could be teaching someone how to tell their story.