It remains weird ...

... seeing the school buses rolling by "my" coffee shop window again. Another school year is beginning--another year without me in the classroom.

It's been a bit of a while ... the last year I taught in public school (8th grade English in Aurora, Ohio--Harmon Middle School) was 1996-97. And I did not complete that year. Eligible for retirement in January 1997, I leapt at it like a crocodile at a careless tourist. I still loved teaching--always have, always will--but Ohio was going insane about what were then called "proficiency tests," and scores were suddenly what everyone (well, most everyone) seemed to care about. I saw the future--the narrowing curriculum, the elimination of things that weren't "on the test"--and I didn't like what I saw.

So I retired the first day I was eligible. And headed off down a road of reading and writing and travel and ... believing it was endless.

A few years later, having coffee with old friend and colleague Tom Davis down at the old Saywell's Drug Store in Hudson (RIP), I heard him say that there were some openings in the English Department at Western Reserve Academy (just about two blocks from my house). He was the department chair--and I had taught there a couple of years in the late 70s, early 80s. So ... I thought I'd give it a whirl for a year or two.

It turned out to be ten: 2001-2011. And I retired a second time, not because of standardized tests or boredom or burn-out or anything else like that. I was ill. Cancer was in me, and I could no longer rely on ... well, on myself. I'd already had to take some time off for various medical reasons--from Bell's palsy to cancer radiation therapy. I didn't want to do that again.

And so ... June 2011 ... I retired for the second (and final) time.

It's weird now, sitting in the coffee shop, seeing kids who go to WRA in there, kids who have no idea who I am, kids who are cruising along in their lives, quite happy and content and only mildly concerned about that Old Dude in the chair reading books all the time. He looks harmless ...

Anyway, I miss teaching a lot--miss the students, the classes, the interactions, my colleagues, etc. I manifestly do not miss the mountains of essays to grade--the whole idea of grading itself grew more and more odious to me as the years rolled along ...

I have hundreds of Facebook friends now--and the vast majority of them are "kids" I taught here and there. The first 7th graders I taught in my first year (1966-67) are now in their early 60s, and that is weird. And I have a grandson beginning 8th grade this year--and that is surpassingly weird. (I taught our own son when he was in 8th grade--and he's now older than I was the year I taught him, 1985-86.)

Oh well. Enough Old Man Self-Pity.

It's just this: a passing school bus, to me, is more than it appears to be. It is history--my history--rolling by me, then beyond me, disappearing into the distance.