Finding Fulfillment in Retirement

Editor’s note: This article is part of Lessons from Leaders, a Next Avenue initiative made possible by the Richard M. Schulze Family Foundation and EIX, the Entrepreneur Innovation Exchange.

Last fall and winter I spent four months teaching third-grade students at a local elementary school how to write. An eight-year-old girl with cornflower blue eyes came to my desk at the end of each day and handed me a tiny white-and-black striped tiger.

"Pet him," she instructed in a sweet, firm voice, and the day's stress melted away.

After I left for another assignment, I received a cardboard box in the mail that contained a small stuffed tiger and a note that said, "I'm sending you this tiger so you don't forget about teaching us. Your friend L."

While I spent most of my career in the corporate world, I had long been drawn toward teaching — partly to experience moments like that. My mentor was my ninth-grade English teacher, one of those rare gems who could encourage and inspire a student like me to become a writer.

My mother had died the winter before I started high school, and I was still in shock when classes began. At my teacher's suggestion, I began keeping a diary, which led to poems and short stories. Writing helped me move forward and get my bearings back.

Now, in retirement, it was my turn to pay it forward.

In early 2022 I was in my early 60s and not ready to officially retire. I wanted to do something meaningful. Early in my career I had written for top business media like the NY Times, Fortune and Business Week, covering marketing and advertising, and then moved to PR, which paid better and was easier.

I taught young PR and marketing professionals how to write, as well as both of my 20-something children. With an ancient degree from SUNY Oswego that said I majored in English and Education, I believed I was more qualified than most substitute teachers. So I became one.

Teaching in public schools as the COVID pandemic swept the country was like entering a foreign land. Everyone wore masks and there was an endless supply of hand sanitizer and soap.

A giant TV screen called a Promethean Board dominated the classroom and had become its central learning device. Every student was given a computer to use for the year. Most lessons were produced in slide shows that were left for substitutes to teach from.

As a daily substitute, I bounced from school to school, which allowed no real connection with the kids. So I picked the schools I liked and became a long-term sub, filling in for a teacher who needed to take a couple of months off.

Long-term substitutes' pay was about 30% higher than the daily rate, but it also came with constant grading, an endless parade of assessments, and other challenges that salaried teachers had. When the Promethean Board didn't work, which was often since Wi-Fi in the schools was unreliable, I improvised and became a much more creative teacher.

The teacher exodus was in full swing when I became a full-time sub, and many of those who stayed were desperately unhappy. The rage and frustration in some schools was concealed only by a thin veneer of professionalism that was used when those at higher pay grades were within earshot. Constant attrition offered a lot of opportunity for new teachers to get plum assignments.

The gaps in student knowledge were daunting. The most persistent problems were in math, where we had to teach multiplication and beginning division to some students who could barely add and subtract. Some students didn't know how to read yet, while others were proficient.

While I could not change the system, the leadership, the curriculum or the malaise that settled over my fellow teachers, I could make a difference with students. And slowly I began to reach them.

The most important thing I could do to get a classroom on track was connect with the kids by using material they cared about and paying a lot of attention to them.

In the fall of 2022, I got a job as a third-grade teacher and brought in a bevy of books and stuffed animals donated by my neighbors. To tap into their innate creativity, I had them make up stories that we called "the Stuffy Chronicles."

During the World Cup, I gave the students obsessed with soccer an assignment to research the teams in the semifinals and convince me their choices would win. They all picked Argentina, which did go on to win, and several offered analyses with data and text explaining why.

Next, I took a job teaching ninth-grade honors English at a local high school, becoming the teacher who had helped me all those years before. The students had gone through multiple substitutes and had no respect for any teacher who walked into the room to help.

The uphill battle began on day one: getting them to care about English again. In one class, the boys thought it was cool to use the F- word every couple of minutes and tormented me in every way they could think of.

Then I was given "The Hate U Give," a book by Angie Thomas that had been banned in several states. The story's protagonist was a young girl who moved daily between a private school and her life in the neighborhood.

My students saw themselves or their older siblings in the fictional account of a Black teen who was murdered for sassing a police officer during a traffic stop. The community in the novel came together and joined what was then a new movement called "Black Lives Matter."

Most students were not reading the book at home, so we began a round robin reading it aloud in class. On my last day, the class — which now included boys who no longer cursed and even said hello to me in the hallway — read aloud and got into enthusiastic debates over the questions, "Why do you think the author chose to put so many different incidents in one chapter?" and "What was she trying to tell you?"

A couple of months later I ran into one of my former students at a local dog park. She said their new teacher paid no attention to them, and they missed me.

My most recent assignment was to replace a very popular sixth-grade teacher who was not only teaching kids how to write but how to organize information.

We started off a speechwriting unit with a video of Amanda Gorman's poem "The Hill We Climb," which she had read at President Biden's inauguration. We discussed adversities overcome by the people she cited in her poem, including Matthew Henson, first Black explorer to reach the North Pole; Junko Tabei, the first woman to climb Mount Everest; and Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to run for elected office. Some Florida schools have banned Gorman's poem.

For three months, I edited their work the way I was taught as a young writer, in one-on-one sessions working on structure, deeper thinking and grammar, among other issues. I was not with them long enough to ask them to figure out how to fix their own work, so I told them what they needed to do, and they came back with much better writing.

In all the years I worked in corporate America, building companies, marketing products and services, it was just about making other people money. None of it was as rewarding watching understanding and connection dawn on a child's face.

On the second-to-last day of sixth grade, one of the students presented me with a gift bag; inside was a mug that read, "Mrs. Stern, You Make a Difference Every Day."