It’s no secret many of us went into teaching because we have a passion for education. That love for helping children never goes away, even after retirement, and especially during the nationwide shutdown due to COVID-19. Many retired teachers are becoming online mentors to students. Their motivation is the same
“I would have been happy being a teacher,” says the 78-year-old singer/actor, reflecting back on the year he took a break from the music business and taught math at Litchfield Preparatory School in Connecticut. “I loved the curriculum; I loved the act of teaching.” After instant fame from the album,
Most of us own an item or 500 that we’ll probably never use again. Their primary function? To collect layers of dust for a family member to blow off when we’re gone. Even if something has sentimental value, you can’t, as they say, take it with you. In ancient India,
In 1928, a young man, in order to pay his tuition at Southwest Texas State College, took a teaching job at Welhausen School in Cotulla, a small town near the Mexican border. His students were children of Mexican-American farmers. He didn’t speak Spanish and many of them didn’t speak English.
The great novelist Gabriel García Márquez once said of his wife Mercedes, “I know her so well, she is completely and utterly unknown to me.” After 56 years of marriage, that’s a curious thing to say. The gist is this: Human beings are constantly changing and evolving. Retirement is a
With hits like “The Closer I Get to You,” “Killing Me Softly,” “Where Is the Love,” and “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” Roberta Flack has captured the hearts of hopeless romantics since 1969. But her first success, as she remembers, was not in the recording studio but
“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify!” —Thoreau Over time, many of us have accumulated things we rarely, if ever, use. When we finally wise up, we come to see that all that stuff—along with the house in which it’s been collecting dust—no longer makes sense. Many
If retirement is throwing you for a loop, you’re definitely not alone. Coleman Barks, a poet and translator, writes this about his last day of teaching at the University of Georgia: “I missed giving my final final exam. I slept through it. The alarm didn’t sound, or I turned it
“Happiness is only real when shared.” —Chris McCandless, from Into the Wild According to the Social Security Administration, nearly 80 million people are retiring at a rate of about 10,000 per day. Meanwhile, since 1990, divorces among the 65+ population have tripled. Coincidence? Probably not. Sociologist Stephanie Coontz, director of
Tess Simonetti, a retired elementary teacher in Massillon, Ohio, has seen it firsthand. “When I began teaching, there was little to no involvement by grandparents with the students,” she says. “By the end of my career, many more grandparents played a large role.” Grandparents today are more involved in their