If you have read my OpEds before, (thank you, thank you very much!) by now you may have noticed the change of title. I tried to hint at this upcoming event in my last post (“Teachers are retiring . . .”) but I am afraid I was just a bit too subtle.

Let me tell you outright: I have retired.

That does not mean that I am not showing up for work at my school next year — I have agreed to return part-time in a different iteration than as a classroom teacher. On my last day, our attendance clerk posted my next year’s class-list on my door. It was blank. I am going to frame it.

It does mean that this coming August, for the first time in thirty three years, if I don’t feel like going to work, for whatever reason, I don’t have to make a phone call by 6 am to ensure that someone will be there in my place. And I don’t have to make absolutely certain that there are written lesson plans that any adult can follow.

In addition to being very liberating, this event causes me to reflect. What is teaching, really? Let me tell you what I think.

I want you to know first off, that this is a diatribe about being totally alone amidst a plethora of emergent humans.

No, that’s not true, actually it is a soliloquy, worthy of Shakespearean iambic pentameter. Unfortunately I am too exhausted to attempt that so you will just have to put up with my usual colloquial obfuscation.

As teachers, we spend an enormous amount of time alone, especially while we are at work. Despite the fact that we are surrounded by people, we are completely alone. I have seen it in my colleagues every day. There can be a room full of active, laughing children engaged and learning and yet that teacher is going it solo. It is the nature of the job.

Each class that I have taught over the years was unique, each group of children brought their own special issues and needs to that class and it was my job to integrate them into the day to day activities that I had planned. This called for constant reappraisal of goals and objectives and daily assessment of progress. These were things I often did alone and on the run. Many decisions had to be made on the spot and quickly. I have read that the only job that forces the employee to make more decisions in a given day than teaching, is that of an air controller. I believe it. On those occasions where I was able to consult with colleagues our problems invariably intersected only at a macro level, that is, broadly and we were left to work out the details ourselves, alone.

Additionally, there is the perpetual self-assessment: Have I taught this objective enough? Do they understand the concept sufficiently to move on? Can I do it another way and be more effective? Teachers always second guess themselves. These kinds of questions constantly trail behind you like hungry cats, meowing for attention. Every time you feed one cat, more cats arrive and to be brutally honest, I am not overly fond of cats.

But I love teaching, few jobs I have held are so intrinsically satisfying. That is probably how I stuck with it for 33 years. And I always knew it is also unpredictable. That kept each day fresh and challenging. Knowing this, I liked to say that my lesson plans were, unintentionally, virtual works of fiction that occasionally, but only on exceedingly rare occasions, came true.

A teacher, walking into the classroom, never really knows for sure what will happen, day to day. Yet I did it approximately 6000 times. When I got in there each school day, with a crowd of developing humans, all together in one room for an extended period of time; I knew one simple fact: whatever I did, whatever occurred, I must still teach.

Teaching is hard. Good teaching is even harder. It is difficult to be the only one in the room who thinks that they know with any certainty what should be going on in the minds of twenty or thirty children, and then making it happen. Try it, I dare you. Just don’t step on the cats.

I don’t get angry easily. People tell me I am laid back almost to the point of napping. But my family can tell you that when I get quiet, you might want to back off. I try not to write when I am angry. There is almost no way to keep the anger out of the text and thereby say something in anger that cooler heads might’ve looked past.

That having been said, I am angry. There are things you just don’t do to people you work with and hope to continue working with. One thing you do not do is put them in a position to compromise them as a professional. At least you don’t do that if you value them as a professional. If you don’t care about them one way or the other, I suppose some people might dismiss their core principles as being unimportant, though I would hope that in my career I have never been guilty of having done that to a colleague.

Since I have been in TUSD I have focused much of my energies on what I see as our worst problem: lack of communication. I get in trouble all the time for sending emails that go out like the blast of a shotgun — everyone I think should be hit with the email gets a copy. I try to make sure that I have left no one out of the loop. I apologize if I bother people but I am adamant that communication within TUSD must improve.

One form of communication endemic to all teachers is the infamous lesson plan. Now I will readily attest that what I write as a lesson plan does not resemble the pages long product that I used to turn out in my younger days. But I try to write on a need-to-know basis and I would no more send a substitute into my class without a lesson plan than I would go outdoors without pants and believe me when I say, I never go outdoors without pants!

If my lesson plans are Spartan in their occurrence my wife’s are the polar opposite. Over the years she has felt compelled to reproduce all of her vast knowledge about children and ther educational development into voluminous lesson plans that outline not only the what, but the why and wherefore of each individual lesson. I can only watch in wonder as she fashions exhaustive daily guidelines that leave little or nothing to chance.

With a teacher like that there is one cardinal principle you do not ignore: Never leave them without enough time to prepare. The other less well known but nearly as equally to be avoided principle is don’t call a teacher on the day before they return to work from a much deserved break and tell them that they won’t be in class for the next week.

My wife was on the verge of tears this morning at the news that she needed to prepare for a sub tomorrow. I said to her, “Honey, you left plans. “I know I did,” she responded, “But I wasn’t planning on having a substitute.” Besides which, she continued, much of the work she was planning for her kids to do was here at home, she had, of course, been working on getting it to get it ready over the break (what else do teachers do when faced with free time?). Should she take it to school? Should she rewrite her plans (not a simple task) to make them more substitute friendly? Who was her sub? When my wife knows she is to be absent she usually tries to get someone she knows who understands how she works.

I could only watch in mute frustration as she agonized over these decisions knowing there was little or nothing I could do to alleviate her anxiety. Meanwhile I have to spend my last day of break in frustration over yet one more example of the total ineptitude of the people in my district when it comes to communicating effectively with each other.

A old friend of mine passed away a while back. I didn’t find out until a week later.

How can that be, you ask, if he was truly a good friend? It’s a good question — one I’ve asked myself. Despite the fact that I have known him for over 35 years, we haven’t seen each other in quite some time, probably half a decade. He lived in Halona:wa; Zuni Pueblo to you melicans, and I’m six hours away in Tucson. We knew how to get a hold of each other. We even knew exactly where the other lived. We looked forward to our infrequent get togethers; dinners at his favorite Mexican restaurant in Gallup or a hasty breakfast when he got off his night job as a security guard. More rarely he would have a day off and he would accompany us to someplace special in Zuni. We were both were sorry when we had to part, promising to get together to share a few laughs again soon.

Like most teachers, for much of my teaching career I had a second job. Because I had been an archaeologist I used my training in that field and taught classes for a local community college. I also worked as a tour guide to archaeological sites and Indian reservations. One of my last full time excavations had been in northeastern Arizona and I had met several members of the Zuni tribe who worked as laborers for the project. Some of them befriended me and one in particular invited me to various activities and dances at the pueblo and we became close friends.

Over the years as I took various trips around the southwest as a tour guide if I ended up in Gallup or passed near Zuni I always stopped to see him and his family. His youngest brother lived at a satellite farming village where he tended the family’s flock of sheep and made traditional pottery out of clays he dug himself. Many of the people on my tours were enamored of his work and would buy pieces from him. Soon my trips to Zuni were added to the tours and eventually Zuni became a tour itself.

That worked out great for me as it gave me another opportunity to see my friend once or twice a year. He took my group to Hawikuh, the Zuni village where Coronado had attacked in retaliation for the killing of Esteban the Moor. He also took us to other prehistoric Zuni villages and some special places in and around the pueblo such as an eagle rehabilitation center.

Eventually, I gave up the second job and my opportunities to see my friend decreased. I always intended to make a special trip just to go see him, just as he had always promised to come to Tucson. The years went on and neither of us followed through.

Then I opened my email, recognized his son’s name and saw that the headline of the message was my friend’s name. “Oh no,” I said to myself. I knew what it was before I even opened it.

Now instead of reality I am left with what should have been.

In that way life is rather like teaching. When you are a school teacher you never finish a school year, it just ends. As the children go out the door that last time you are always left saying, “Wait, I didn’t get to tell you some important things, you can’t leave yet.” You are left sitting in a room surrounded by the residue of the year. You look around and wonder what else you could have done.

Questions haunt your summer break and drive your preparation for a new year. What could I have done better? Should I have spent more time with this or that? Do they really understand (fill in your critical objective here)? If I had only known then . . . .

This continues until the next year when an entirely new group shows up. In the rush of a new year with all its decisions you often forget what you learned in reflection over the summer or find that it is not applicable to this group, or just fail in your intentions, not necessarily through action but sometimes just by distraction. You just never do all you meant to. It is the curse of the teacher. No matter how much you do, you always could have done more.

And eventually you are left with your memories and regrets. And that just has to be enough.