Right now, thanks to a wonderful student teacher, I spend a great deal of my day observing her teaching, taking care of the occasional disrespectful child or working on my computer.  I’m certainly still working, just not in front of the students.  So lately, I’ve had a few students come ask me things like, “when are you going to teach again”, or just “are you going to teach again?”, to which I respond, I AM teaching, just not teaching you.  However, I did have a girl come up to me the other day and ask, “are you doing anything, Mrs. Bush?”.

Now, I’m not sure what she saw me doing (obviously nothing), but the truth is that I manage to stay busy most of the day.  So yes, I am observing and making sure things are going well in the classroom, but I’m also organizing field trips, creating permission slips, sending out parent letters, getting an accompanist for the concert, working on a specialist event in a couple of weeks, planning rehearsal schedules, going over music, etc.  The truth is that I don’t usually just walk in at 8:00 a.m. and walk out at 3:45.  Without help, more often or not, I am staying until 5:00 or 6:00 or coming in on the weekends to get these things done.

This is why I love plan days.  I actually wish we had two plan days in a row because one is never enough.  I’m not sure people outside of education understand just how important a component planning is for teachers.  Seating charts, word walls, lesson plans, of course, and dead guys – I mean composers, don’t just drop from the sky.  These have to be created or studied in order to teach or use them as tools to teach.  And that takes time.  And while I have been teaching long enough that I have a lot of tricks up my sleeve, when I have new curriculum to learn, that takes time.  Because I’m teaching six different grade levels and 400+ kids, it takes time to plan what we’re going to do and in what order.

And then today, yet another child asked when I was going to teach again.  I gave the same response as earlier, and one of the kids asked, “are you tired?”, which prompted another student to ask “are you going to retire?”.  “Can Miss Bell teach here then?”, and so I ask, “well, what am I going to do for a job then?”.  And frankly, yes, I’m tired and yes, I think of the “retired” word now and then and yes, sometime I should move over and let a young thing like Miss Bell have a turn at this art-form called teaching.  But no, I’m not leaving.

I ran into a neighbor in the building yesterday, one I hadn’t seen in a while.  We used to ride down the elevator in the morning as we were both going to work and then she retired.  So when I ran into her she said she hadn’t seen me in awhile and I responded with, well that’s because you retired, lucky girl!  Then she replied, well, it’s not all that it’s cracked up to be.  I think that’s what concerns me about retirement.  I’m working the equivalent of two jobs now, stopping cold turkey could kill me!

Once a long time ago, another teacher stopped teaching her students so that I could get my feet wet.  So in the meantime, for the rest of the semester, I’ll be sitting at my desk, filing things away, running errands, and working on the computer while my student teacher gets her feet wet. And do nothing.