This is my 40th year in education. I’ve told people I’m retiring after this year. I’ve told my staff. People ask me if I’m excited, but I still have the whole year ahead of me. It’s still my school. They’re still my kids. I can’t say, I’m just going to put in this year. I want to leave it prepared for whoever comes and sits in that office so they don’t have three months to build an entire plane — the plane’s built and they can take off with it.
When I retire I still want to give back. I’d like to work with student teachers so that I’m still giving to kids and I’m still in schools but shaping them a different way. It’s no big surprise to anyone that we have to be always changing. These are not the same students I taught when I started teaching in 1977. They have all the information and all the exposure that my high school kids had. What they don’t have are the skills to deal with it. As teachers, as partners with parents, that’s our biggest job right now is helping them with this onslaught of information and the exposure to a world they don’t know how to deal with. I think our job has shifted as dispensers of information to coaches and helping them survive the world they will be facing.
#WeAreVBSchools