You Just Know. . .

As an educator, how will I know it's time to retire?

“You just know,” a colleague replied when I asked how he knew it was time to retire.

He’s a respected teacher who encourages students to ask questions and engages them in the complexities of American history, including the discomforting parts. The electives he teaches are some of the many courses at my high school I wish I could take because I know they’d stretch me.

And he isn’t the first educator to give me this cryptic answer.

A friend I’ve taught with for years recently shared that he’s had glimpses of what “you just know,” might mean. I haven’t told him yet, but I’ve had them too.

As much as I value technology, I recognize it’s a factor. Teachers at every school I’ve worked in since the 1990’s have described feeling pushed out of education by the rapid pace of technological change, their shoulders sagging under the weight of their discouragement and frustration.

In the rural middle school where I did my student teaching, when the single wheezing photocopier was out of service or backed up, I cranked out (literally) quizzes, tests, and handouts on a spirit duplicator (a.k.a., ditto). Or maybe it was a mimeograph. I don’t recall. What I do remember is how students would sometimes steal a whiff of the oddly sweet odor wafting from the purple and white copies, their heads dipping toward the paper as if offering a quick prayer.

A spirit duplicator (image from University of Dundee Museum Services)

At my first full-time teaching gig in a suburban high school, there were several reliable photocopiers, a welcome upgrade. There must have been desktop PCs too, probably in computer labs, but I can only picture the lone Apple in the English department’s workroom that looked like a mini console TV turned on end, its small monochrome screen dwarfed by its plastic casing.

Since becoming a librarian, I’ve weathered the Google-will-be-the-demise-of-libraries death knell, helped implement a 1:1 laptop initiative in a district at the national forefront then of closing the digital divide, and supported teachers through the adoption of learning management systems (formerly reserved for distance education) and the pandemic pivot to Zoom. I’m accustomed to technology’s shifting tides.

But I have to admit, though I’ve waded into the deluge of artificial intelligence (AI), especially generative AI, to help discern what practices make sense and how to minimize related inequities, there’s a tiny part of me that sighs, shoulders shagging, and mutters, “Really? This again?”

A second clue has cropped up too. On the one hand, working with teens regularly renews my hope in the future and keeps me younger. On the other, when I don’t recognize the bands that students are raving about or my allusions to (once) popular culture—like mixtapes or Voldemort—draw blank stares, I feel as old as a ditto machine. To what extent does my waning hipness impact my effectiveness?

Yet the core of teaching, caring, doesn’t require an app or upgrade, or lapse out of style. In the race to integrate the latest tech or cover content prescribed by the College Board, state standards, or Common Core, it’s easy to skip asking students how they’re doing, listening to them, complimenting them on an achievement unrelated to class, or checking in when they look discouraged or sad, but it’s a key component to the belonging that fosters students’ success.

Thankfully, even schools that lose sight of this can recover. A few years ago, a high-performing school like ours had let this slip. Competition, testing, and academic pressures had eroded teachers’ and students’ wellbeing. You could feel it in the halls. A new principal issued a simple challenge. By the end of the first quarter, every teacher was expected to know something about each student in their classes and in any club they sponsored or team they coached—something beyond how well they could solve a proof, write an essay, or shoot a three.

In just two years, this practice was a key ingredient in restoring care and trust in their school. The change was tangible.

As a high school librarian, I care for students by curating resources that anticipate and respond to their needs and reflect their diverse identities, and by listening to them—during research consults, in classroom lessons, mindfulness sessions, and chats in the library and halls, and by collaborating with them and fostering their leadership. I also affirm their creativity, hard work, compassion, and courage. If I slip into treating students like walking GPAs or AP test scores or wall myself in my office with my door closed, I need to go. I don’t intend to let that happen.

Plenty of other reasons might tip the scales instead, like an illness, a loved one who needs care, a new and terrible administrator, or the irresistible draw of another interest or opportunity.

I hope it’s the irresistible draw of something that tugs me away, but if not, what’s more likely than discovering I’ve stopped caring is a shift another colleague described. Gradually, she said, minor annoyances you used to shrug off—a student on the phone after you asked everyone to put them away, popcorn on the library carpet, the panel display that goes into update mode just as class begins—stick to you instead. As if an anti-irritant coating that once protected you wears away.

Now and then, there’s a day when I sense scratches or thin patches in mine. If those days multiply, diminishing my enthusiasm for what I do, I’ll know it’s my time.

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Here’s a poem for your pocket this week: “On not Posting the Bees to Instagram” by Tess Taylor. April is National Poetry Month! If you’d like more poems to mark this occasion, sign up for Poem-a-Day from the Academy of American Poets.

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If you’ve already retired, whether from education or something else, how did you know it was time? Consider leaving a comment below.