• What are
  FAVORITES?
  Bookmark any page of our site conveniently in this one area.
  
  Sign In or Register so you can take advantage of all of the features of After Fifty Living

When I finished college, I got a job teaching at the high school I graduated from.  Both of my sisters were still students there, so I taught some of their friends, which was a bit awkward.  It was the only time all three of us were in the same building; my mother joked that it was the first time she knew were were all in the same place at the same time. Being colleagues with my former teachers was unsettling, but I soon adapted. I worked there for four years, then left to work in public relations and advertising; I got married and had one child and started working part-time as a sports writer for a local paper and thought I was done with teaching forever.  But at a league banquet, I ran into my old principal, who asked if I wanted to come back part-time. This sounded like a nice way to supplement our income, so I agreed.

Round Two started out rocky - a month-long strike - and there was a lot of bad blood the whole year.  When I became pregnant, I left at the end of the third marking period and was SURE I was done with teaching.  I was still working at the paper and kept that job, rising to sports editor, as my children grew.  I was covering high school sports and often took them with me to games, so it was a pretty parenting-friendly job, but once my kids got to junior high (same district I had gone to and taught at) and starting playing sports themselves, I decided to look for something else that would allow me to watch their games.  I got a job as a training consultant (and went to grad school), and I thought THAT would last for the rest of my working life, but things went south for the company and I found myself underemployed just as my kids graduated from high school.  I had maintained ties with the school and the then-principal offered me a job in 2000, and thus began Round Three.

Now I've been back for twelve years and nearly every year I teach students whose PARENTS I taught in Rounds One and Two.  I also taught a girl whose grandmother I went to school with.  I think if I end up teaching a grandchild of one of my earlier students it will be time to hang it up.  I'm the oldest teacher in my department and one of the oldest in the school (although there is still one who taught ME in eighth grade), but the kids and the young teachers keep me young. I'm doing new things all the time and always learning, and I marvel at the fact that I walked into this building in 1966 and I'm still there 45 years later! I continue to grow and develop as a teacher, still taking classes, learning new techniques and incorporating new materials and trying to figure out how to help my students prepare for life after high school.  So who knows how long I'll be here?

While I wish I had lived in more and diverse places throughout my life, there is a wonderful symmetry in teaching where I learned. Few people get a chance to see the school from both sides.  I'm getting myself ready to retire, but I know that when the fall Homecoming football game and festivities come around, I'll be there for a double celebration.

Leave a Comment -

Guidelines: We welcome your thoughts, but for the sake of all visitors to AfterFiftyLiving.com, please refrain from the use of obscenities, personal attacks or slurs. All comments are subject to our terms of use and may be removed. Repeat offenders may lose commenting privileges.