Leisure. What a concept!

So, you may ask, what's it like to be retired from teaching? After the sudden hot spell that hit over Labor Day weekend, clearly it's much cooler than the alternative. We remarked between us several times last week how glad we were not to be spending our days in those stifling classrooms, but that's not the only way that retirement appeals to us.

It's the pace of life that changes: the true relaxation that comes when you're not under constant pressure to accomplish some teaching-related task--short-term preparation, long-range planning, correcting student writing, writing college recommendations, going to meetings, analyzing test data, and dealing with school politics. It's all draining and stressful, and it lasts throughout the school year. In the brave new world of immutable standards and accountability, it really carries on through the summer as well.

Yeah, I know, everybody's job is stressful, everybody has more to do than is possible to accomplish in a day, but a fully-engaged teacher has it in spades: You are paid to teach students, which most of us relish doing, but the actual classroom contact time somehow becomes time subtracted from the hours in the day that must be used to do all the other behind the scenes tasks that are piled on. You teach all day, but it's only after the students take off, late in the afternoon, that the job begins. And that part of the job never finishes; you just have to decide on your own appropriate quitting time. For us, that was about usually 10 p.m., if we were lucky.

It's escaping that desperate, hopeless pace that makes retirement so attractive. Suddenly there's time commensurate with what's on the agenda for the day. And when that sinks in, it's glorious. Summer acts as a sort of buffer zone that seems familiar, but now that school has started again, we can't help reciting all the routines of launching the academic year that aren't playing out this year: that first set of writing samples from ninth graders that you need to mark meticulously--preferably this first weekend--to give students an idea of what high school writing standards are going to be, or laying the ground work for the first reflective essay from a 10 GATE class, or working through our English Lit. overview unit tying together writers ranging from the Anglo-Saxons, Wordsworth, and Shakespeare to Kipling and the Clash. And then there's always the department's writing format to plough through.

Part of the relief is not having to repeat one's own brilliant lessons another time, but even better is the sense that you don't have to keep beating your head against that wall anymore. The enterprise is generally one of continually trying your best to give something very valuable to someone who doesn't want it. The energy involved in perfecting the gift and making it useful to each individual student is inexorably drained away in the mere process of handing it over to unwilling recipients--convincing them simply to accept the gift for what it is.

Leisure, then, becomes this refreshing feeling of using one's time effectively, even selfishly, having space to fill rather than infinite obligations to cram into limited space. It's taking one thing at a time rather than everything at once.

And having the opportunity to reflect on the events of our life and times.