Herrington: Retirement and Hindsight

I worked for 33 years as a public school teacher, and I really loved my job. Oh, don’t get me wrong, there were days when I thought I was going to lose my ever-loving mind, sure. And the different factions that needed to be appeased and pleased, parents, kids, society, culture, administration, state, employers, children of all of those, and my own personal and professional challenges, these all pressured me to make and do and be many things. But, as jobs go, and I did have others to compare it to and from what others around me in my life had to say, teaching was a fine career, and I am glad to have done it. That being said, I am now retired, and that has brought a whole new ballgame to the foreground.

Teachers are always assumed to be a service group, a not-for-profit sector of the population. This is a ludicrous thought. I bought cars, houses, yard machines, appliances, and books. Those came out of my pay check. And now I still have those things to buy, but in retirement I have slightly less money, and that dollar amount is shrinking with inflation every day in value.

Since retiring, I have had occasion to look around and think a lot more about a lot of things, and one of them is the state of the union, my own union. As a retiree, I thought of these years as days to reflect and to ponder and to work at my own ideas and projects, and these days are certainly that. But I am not the sort who can sit still and it seems to me that what little I knew of the world has somewhat changed and in some ways not changed at all, and I would have thought there might have been more advancement.

My young naiveté assumed that while I was teaching children how to think more clearly and how to multi-dimensionally process data in order to meet the upcoming challenges of the 21st Century, there would be some evolved 21st Century thinking to be done. I have awakened at the end of a 1/3 of a century to find that in some ways we have taken 3 steps forwards and 4 steps back. We seem in some ways more divided and the conclusions we have come to are more fossilized and more entrenched.

I’ve come out the other side of my Rip Van Winkle time in the classroom only to find that in some ways we have retreated into classic arguments. By now, I thought we were supposed to have flying cars and have gotten beyond liberal and conservative divisions. With instantaneous and compiling data programs to parse out more reliable threads of understanding, it is a wonder we have not used our new super-computing powers to merge all the known data to create computer simulations of what our various strategies would do for us.

Instead, I find the media split into factions and used as a head-pounding, mind-numbing cyber-cannon to pulverize the senses and dull the thinking. It seems like if you set your eyes on any one channel for more than 20 minutes, you can get the news fused to your forehead with editorial precision and opinion driving forcefulness. Sprinkle in a few fresh faces, a little cooking, some culture, and some steamy water cooler stuff, and you’ve got pre-digested news.

IF you follow any one news source, it will seem like the most incredible display of truth in the world. It’s the job of the media to present itself as the ultimate source of the absolute truth, even if there are other stations, channels, or news sources that say the complete opposite! One of the things that I thought we might have worked through is this whole idea of what is really true, historically and culturally. Were there really dinosaurs? Did the Jewish holocaust happen? Is humanity only 6,000 years old? Did we really go to the moon? Is Star Trek a socialist sitcom? I find some of the work on the Science Channel and on NETGEO, and on other “educational” shows to be highly entertaining. I have not been in a hole in my classroom for the last 3 decades, but I am wondering why in some cases we are further from understanding and not closer.

The prison system, medical prescriptions, education, politics, policy, mental health, economics, banking, international affairs, military uses, and a host of things that were being discussed as I was a young buck in the 1960’s are still being discussed with the same clamor and dissonance they were creating 50 years ago, or even more so! Religion and partisanship, recriminations and special interests, crusades and bribery, over control and a loss of privacy? These cannot be the directions we were headed when I put my nose down to the grindstone 40 years ago to go off to college to learn how to teach. I graduated from high school in 1971.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1971

Are we really that much further along? Racism, jobs, civil rights, poverty, ingenuity, inventions, whatever? Oh, I know computers are cheaper and faster, for sure. But it seems like we make so much junk that barely works. We seem more scattered and scared and divided. I can remember being in church when I was 6, where I would actually go all by myself since it was across the street from my house, and I only had to walk across a small bricked road to get there. The water tower seemed 100 feet tall. The park right there on College in Tyler was huge! And church was the refuge of everything sacred and serene.

But now? That house is a wreck. That church may be dysfunctional since when I was there last it looked vacant. The water tower was only 30 feet tall. The park was about 4 acres. And I still don’t have a flying car. The least they could have done is to have gotten the story straightened out so we could be operating under a banner of truth. As it is, all we’ve come to is blaming and shaming, and the old problems are still with us. Maybe we’ve got some clear headed young people who will bother to straighten this mess out. If not, it will not be from a lack of trying. Okay, Kids, show’em what ya got.

My boss at this paper, an ex-student.
My mortgage loan officer, an ex-student.
My bank teller, yep, an ex-student.
Teachers, lawyers, doctors, technicians, IT persons, parents, and now grandparents. Thinking clearly and doing something about it…I hope it is infectious.

runningturtle87