Post date: May 2, 2017 8:17:06 PM
What a difference a year makes! Reflecting on my “new life” since retirement
I saw a friend the other day and she asked if I was still teaching part time: I responded that no, I was doing other things and gave her one of my “Geeky grandma” business cards. I had been reflecting on what were the rituals of the months of April and May for the past 25 years of my life: as a Community College teacher, with at least three sections of Composition 2, one of Intro to Literature, and one of the Technology in the Classroom, these four to six weeks were frantic!
There were essays to read and grade, worksheets to score, exams to update and administer, gradebooks to update, and anxious students to deal with, including some who wanted to negotiate for a better grade. Yikes. There was the wonderful thing called FINALS week, which is no more, by the way: a terrible decision, I believe. For my Comp. and Lit finals, students did an activity in class and then I spoke with each one briefly to look at their final grade. My Tech in the Classroom students did presentations, showing off their Thematic Units. These activities do not always work well in a 50-minute slot. There were endless days and nights of grading almost nonstop when not in class, and then when the last scores were entered into the gradebook, the process of deciding if a student’s total was closer to a C or a D. I learned not to be the first one to post grades: it would simply mean that more students would be contacting me to contest their final grade.
I remember coming home, as if waking up from a bad dream, and looking around my messy house with bleary eyes from lack of sleep. Things had a way of piling up when you didn’t have time to deal with them during those last two or three weeks: mail, laundry, dishes, newspapers, and clutter. My office at work would also be less than pristine. I usually began the summer exhausted!
So, what are my weeks like now that I am retired? I’ve gotten more involved in my community and done some volunteer work. I have especially enjoyed the involved with the Cedar Falls Authors Festival committee; we have been working together since September, and our events begin this weekend! Check out our website, www.cfauthorsfestival.org for details and notice the events page, with an embedded Google calendar.
I feel productive: in the last two weeks, I have tweaked the Cedar Falls Authors Festival website that I created over the past semester, I’ve given a friend feedback on blog entries, and I helped another friend revamp her resume and cover letter. I wrapped up my semester with Molly, the UNI student I have been meeting with all semester and attended the party where we celebrated the friendships we had made and received our books with our students’ stories about us. I had a wonderful student, Trey, in the fall.
Not only that, I wrote my column for the Courier about fitness apps and devices. I took a tub of things to Stuff and worked in my garage sorting through tubs. I took things to recycling and sorted through a set of binders, trying to get rid of old papers that I no longer needed.
More importantly, I have spent a day every week for the past two semesters with Mason, my three-year-old grandson: in addition, I have had him and big brother Corbin a few days around the holidays when there was no school or daycare. Mason and I have had fun playing in the back yard, at the playground, at the pond with a gazebo on the Western Home grounds, or shopping at Walmart. I’ve made a small mountain of waffles, watched Daniel Tiger and Curious George with him, taken pictures of his antics, laughed at silly things he did, and made things with Legos or magnetic shapes. We’ve made messes, we’ve cleaned them up, and he has demonstrated his sock folding skills, understanding of the importance of brushing one’s teeth, and helped me learn how to relax.
I have also invested an hour a day in my physical health, and missed very few days since January in walking and tracking what I ate. It took some time to get past the 5,000 to 7,000 steps mark but now I generally hit 8,000 to 10,000 steps. I’m down at least 12 pounds but getting into smaller jeans, so I know that I have made a difference. My husband Mike and son Jon inspired me: both have taken to walking for fitness in the past year.
Mike and I have taken a few trips in the past year, with lots of plans for the future. We’ve worked our way through an impressive list of Netflix series, and so far, we have enjoyed them all.
I also saw the book of essays about Mothers published last fall; I wrote a chapter about my mother, Charlotte, and now I am working on one about her mother Nellie and grandmother Eva, who were like mother and daughter. I’m digging into mom’s photos and multiple volumes of typed up family history.
Sometime in the next few weeks I hope to get a copy of the book The Midwestern Moment about the Midwestern Writers of the 1900s in the mail: my chapter about Ruth Suckow is included and represents a great deal of work. I had several wonderful peer reviewers: Mike and Barbara.
All in all, it has been a wonderful first year of retirement. I still have a list of people that I want to contact and reconnect with over lunch; I still have tubs to go through, pictures to sort and scan in, paper files to sort and discard. However, I have had time to reflect, read, write, blog, and enjoy the beautiful view from my four season porch!
Last updated May 2, 2017