The hubby has taken a significant step towards retirement from the school district where he has taught since 1971 (with a two-year hiatus to teach in Germany). He has returned his contract for the school year 2010-2011, signed with the box checked "I intend to retire at the end of this school year." He has until April 15 to change his mind, however, without a monetary penalty.
I think he is ready. This year has brought its stresses and strains in terms of the classes he has had to teach.
He has two classes of "regular" U.S. History. He had hoped that he would have significant curriculum and lesson-planning help from the six or seven other teachers who teach the same course. Although they are supposed to coordinate their lessons, they don't. And none of them were "brave" enough to share individual lesson plans with him. After all, he is the senior member of the department and has taught this course before, but not in the last decade and the textbook is new to him.
The students in these "regular" sections are sophomores who have generally low reading scores, not much background information, and very little motivation. They expect that he, the teacher, will teach them everything in class they will need to know to pass the course. That means they routinely do not do any outside-of-class preparation.
He has three other classes, two in AP U.S. History and one in AP European History. These courses prepare students to take the College Board Advanced Placement exam at the end of the school year. If the student scores high enough most universities will grant them incoming credit for the course. Students in these classes have a fairly good background and are pretty highly motivated to do well.
For the AP classes there is a lot of writing that has to be taught and critiqued. That is very time-consuming. And there is a lot of content for the student to master. In addition, he is also using new-to-him textbooks in both subjects.
All in all, he is finding the teaching to be quite a strain. We'll see what happens by April 15th.
1 comment:
Deciding to retire can be a big decision but later, one many of us wonder why we questioned such an action. Perhaps retiring full time is a way to go and substitute teaching be something to consider. Problem with that,(from comments friends have made) is they're "on call" almost as often as teaching full time.
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