In a year's time I will be retiring from my job.
For me and many women like me, our workplace provides the only social contact other than relatives. After work and household chores, there is no time or energy for having a social life outside these two spheres. So retirement is quite scary.
Secondly, the daily contact with young people is definitely uplifting. They provide some purpose, some laughter, some energy in my life. After retirement, I may just have senior citizens for company-- those who I look upon as 'old people' forgetting my age.
For all my rants about them, I will miss my students the most.
9 comments:
'Retirement sounds scary' is what my mom told me last week (she will retire in 2014-15).
I told her, firstly, there are so many things to do even after that, that the thought of idleness or boredom is totally baseless. She can write articles for local magazines/newspapers (she is not tech-savvy, and blogs etc. are not something she can do), she can read up whole lot books which she always wished she could but never had time, she can teach literature etc. to financially weak students in the evenings, watch good movies, join the local yoga class in the mornings, etc etc ...
Secondly, feeling 'old' has absolutely nothing to do with age or retirement...unless you replace your dreams with memories, you are young, no matter what your age is !..Memories make you feel old..dreams keep your spirit fresh and hopeful. Betrand Russell slept 5-6 hrs a day when he was 95 yrs old, and was writing his auto-biography then, and giving public speeches and protests against war etc. on streets !
What more should I say to my mom ? :-)
r u planning on continuing as say a visiting faculty? .. or is it cold turkey? :)
@DN's mom:- My father who had to stop his education after high school learnt physics(from popular physics books) at the age of 75, when he went to visit my brother. Next he learnt to paint from his daughter-in-law. Then between age 80-85, wrote two books on Indian philosophy.He had his own website for this and used to upload articles daily. Now, at 87, he has slowed down. My mother,77, knows a lot about tamil music...Vaishnavite and Saivite Bhakti traditional music. I am now trying to make her write a blog. Her usual pastime is listening to carnatic music on the internet or watching tamil serials on the net since she must do so when her grandson is away at school. So it's never too late to get on to the internet.
@suvrat kher; I am planning to teach in schools in the poorer neighbourhoods...not really teach the syllabus, but trying to develop projects to make kids understand what they learn in class.
At the moment I am not sure how, but am trying to figure it out. Any ideas?
Why not follow along with Gretchen Rubin's logic (the Happiness Project) and join a club or start one?
@Julie: maybe I will.
L- very commendable post retirement plans :) I have no experience teaching at school level but a few ideas floating around in my mind -
1) Using educational tools on the web. you mentioned poor schools but will it be possible to take a laptop with you and work in small groups with educational material?
2) Using current events touching on science and tech highlighted in national newspapers to start a discussion on how basic principles can lead to applications. so you can take the newspaper with you to school and point out how the topics taught in the syllabus are actually useful. You can use this as an aid to teach critical thinking. what has the report missed asking? are there factual or other mistakes in the article and how to spot them.
3) enhancing visual thinking by encouraging students to sketch and learn about relationships by learning to construct and interpret graphs.
regards
Suvrat
@suvrat kher: Thanks. will think about all of these. I am collecting ideas and thinking of how to implement them.
I have a history of making good plans, but not implementing them. So I keep repeating my plan to whoever asks, in the hope that the embarassment of not doing it after so much publicity would drive me to do something!!
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