Humming in My Head

The transition from worker bee to retiree has been complex, compounded by a virulent respiratory infection that kept me housebound since returning from the cruise. Judging from the pile of prescriptions and the physical issues accompanying the need for the medications, it's obvious I have an immune issue that must be addressed more firmly and thoroughly before I step into another airplane flying to anywhere!

I did make it to my last two classes, but I honestly don't remember much of it. I did post my final grades as required, but I could not tell you how I accomplished that task. I did not make it to my last graduation, which broke my heart. I drove to the doctor twice, first to see what the hell attacked my legs, and then to deal with it again when the first treatment protocol didn't work. The diagnosis went from sun poisoning to a bacterial infection in two days, accompanied by the respiratory infection that either masked or exacerbated the leg issues. The cough wracked my chest cavity, leaving me breathlessly heaving for air and holding onto my rib cage for dear life.

This was not how I envisioned winding down my career, but few things in my life have ever gone as I anticipated, including my career. I plan and God laughs: S/He enjoys tossing in some unfamiliar ingredients to see what I do with them, often believing more firmly than I that I can, indeed, make lemonade, as well as a host of other tart treats, when given lemons. Being able to roll with the punches has led me in interesting directions, some of which I never would have taken on my own, but it's also brought me the deepest pain of my lifetime, especially when another person's vendetta temporarily cost me my beloved career. The most difficult thing I have ever done was to walk back into a classroom after leaving it for what I believed in my deepest soul was the last time. I learned, however, that it is true: I have to fall to the bottom to have any hope of ever climbing back to the top.

Education has changed in the past 40 years, and not, in my humble opinion, for the better. Instead of analyzing the data of centuries of educational trends and realizing that about 12-15% of all high school graduates actually attend -- and complete -- college, "we" decided that ALL students "need" a college education, so "we" discontinued the majority of educational opportunities that do not conform with that mindset. Hence, the occupational programs disappeared from curricula nationwide; ditto the fine arts, the performing arts, the myriad physical education programs, the field trips, the core literature, the sequence of progressively more challenging classes that take a student from basics to more advanced educational skills. We stripped out what students need and replaced the curricula with what politicians tout to be elected to office: educational parity that begins in the simple, but erroneous, assumption that all students will do equally well if I say they will in front of a TV camera.

Once we no longer maintained high expectations for ourselves and others, we lost the strength necessary to demand more of our students, rather than expecting less. Good ideas morphed into nightmares, including the infamous No Child Left Behind legislation that was a a good idea to achieve educational parity, but destroyed educational opportunities. We dumbed down the curricula in an effort to create artificial success for the under-performing students, rather than re-educating that segment of the population with authentic academic performance that leads to authentic academic success. We are a nation of do-gooders who failed to do good when we actively believed and promoted the idea that students can only be successful when we refuse to allow them to fail. We learn more from failure than we do from meaningless, artificial success, but the public wants to believe that all students are equal and will be the shooting stars of tomorrow who get a good education and a well-paying job, a mantra I've heard so many times that it's hard to believe that anyone still believes it.

Good jobs and a good future demand a good education, but we have forgotten that last part in favor of feeling good about ourselves as the process. We feel good about ourselves when we perform to an expected standard, not when the standard is lowered so we can feel good about ourselves!

We forgot the basic premise of society: every tribe needs a chief and a tribal council, but what makes a tribe function are the good members of the tribe who listen to the leaders and then get the job done. The chief may decide where to make camp, but someone has to erect the tents, gather the food, and start the cooking fire. We have destroyed the worker mentality of our nation, the huge corps of workers who take the idea guy's ideas and turn them into successes! We led a generation of young people to believe that they are somehow above the worker bee functionality, that each of them somehow deserves to be farther up the ladder of success based on a diploma, rather than a demonstration of competency and success in finishing tasks and accomplishing goals. We taught a generation of young people to believe that they deserve more, they deserve better, they deserve it right now -- and they want to be paid at the highlest levels of compensation without having to do the time to earn that performance pay.

There is nothing wrong with being the best worker in a corporation, just as there is nothing wrong with being the best CEO: both ends of that spectrum have to be in place before the corporation can function successfully!

I cannot influence the young teachers coming behind me to do better, to work harder, to be more concerned about their educational impact on the students in the seats unless they, too, believe that our career is a calling, not a cop-out. Young teachers are stripping the curricula of anything they do not know personally: if it's too hard to teach, it must be too hard to learn, and, therefore, expendable. It's a lot more fun to sit and talk with students about personal experiences than it is to teach them about professional responsibilities, and everyone's job should be ... fun, right? Students should never have to pay for a course they fail, so the teacher has to find a way for everyone to pass ... right? Even when it means lowering the course expectations, as well as the grading scale, to accommodate the lowest common denominator ... right?

It is time for my career to fade into the sunset, for me to let go of a lifetime of doing my best and hoping it's good enough. I know I did as well as some, better than others, and not as well as I had planned, but that pretty much captures the essence of what life is all about!