Good Endings and Strange Beginnings: Snow Day Reflections on Retirement's First Days

So already, this morning at 4:45, I received that same robocall that the entire staff of the Cambridge Public Schools received:  No School Today, February 5.  Just more evidence that I'm squarely, firmly established only in retirement limbo -- not in retirement itself. The Information, Communication, and Technology Services Department has yet to delete me though I am no longer on the district's payroll.  While I was warned that my CPSD e-mail account would be disabled right after I officially exited the school for the last time (and stepped responsibility-free into the January sunshine, which was the part they didn't mention), I am very much still connected. There's a peculiar thrill that comes with seeing all those unread e-mails amassing and feeling no obligation or temptation to open and read them. I can't deny it:  sometimes I feel like Gregor Samsa's little sister in the last paragraph of The Metamorphosis*:  she too wanders into metaphorical and literal sunlight with a jubilant sense of relief that is deserved, and also heartless.

But, of course, today's there's no sunlight: just snow and more snow, and the occasional light tapping of sleet on the windowpane. Retirement limbo thus far is an alternation between the euphoria of mid-day sunshine and the begrudging acknowledgment of winter's ultimate claim on the world and the spirit. When the winter sun shines bright, as it did last Thursday in Johnson, Vermont on the day of Scott's Beauty and Darkness gallery talk, retirement beckons like an adventure; when winter's gray and white layer and proliferate, retirement feels like everything else feels:  thwarted, challenged, burdened, blank, pointless. 

My feelings are real, but my talk is a little silly: it is only Day 3, and Days 1 and  3 have boasted accumulating snow -- a lot of snowfall for one week even for New England. The truth is that I'm alternating between enjoying my new freedom (consciously needing to remind myself that I don't have to wake up at 5:15) and feeling strangely, uncomfortably untethered. Some years ago, my friend Diane Tabor, a former CRLS assistant  principal, remarked that retirement is like adolescence except that one has better skills for navigating it.  I can see the identity crisis looming on my personal horizon -- but I also have the adult wisdom to understand that constructing that new, purposeful identity prematurely would be a mistake, and I'm feeling dedicated to not making decisions for the sake of eliminating uncertainty. A couple of consecutive days of very good weather would probably go a long way to helping me embrace my freedom . . ..

But on a more positive note, I'm coming to understand why I left CRLS feeling primarily peaceful and positive, even though at a number of points in the last seven years I've felt disappointed, dismayed, dismissed, discouraged, unappreciated, sometimes even enraged. Scott's gallery show helped me understand why.  Exhibitions -- of paintings, of teacher learning -- make statements that their creators choose to make.  To exhibit is to assert oneself, to claim turf, to dare to think, to value unapologetically.  Exhibitions celebrate and empower.

At one of my lowest moments as a CRLS educator, one of my former principals, Ed Sarasin, gave me a piece of advice that became my survival mantra: "Be the educator you need to be." As my own beliefs about how best to improve teaching, deepen learning, and foster the achievement of all students diverged increasingly from those being both imposed on and cultivated within CRLS, I had one consistent outlet for following Ed's advice: the Project Zero/Making Learning Visible Project-supported Wednesday Afternoon Teacher Learning Group, the group of CRLS teachers who have met every two-to-three weeks for the past eight years (our group has core members and new members every year) -- and who annually create CRLS' exhibition of teacher learning. (The photo here shows the Teachers' Resource Center ready for an opening reception some years ago.) My role was to facilitate this group's ongoing inquiry into teaching and learning -- and to support the group's creation of our annual exhibition.  Every year, members of the group did right by one another as educators and human beings -- and also managed to share something of value with members of the CRLS faculty who chose to check out our exhibition.  Every year, I felt proud of who we were, how we worked together, and what we shared.  Hardly the stuff of anger and bitterness; more the stuff of love and authentic learning community.




Out of this work grew a particularly significant and defining personal teaching-and-learning experience. Re-assigned to teach one English class during the 2010-2011 school year, I finally could experiment with cultivating a "pedagogy of listening" in my own classroom. Carla Rinaldi describes the practices and principles  associated with a "pedagogy of listening" with passion and commitment in Making Learning Visible:  Children as Individual and Group Learners -- and they are the practices and principles that are dearest to my educator heart, the ones that I believe have the best chance of improving teaching, deepening learning, and fostering the achievement of all students because they refuse to define students and teachers by their "deficits" -- and insist on defining them as people rather than problems. The end result of my efforts was "Grappling with Greatness:  Negotiating Different Points of View in AP Literature," one of six learning portraits featured in Visible Learners: Promoting Reggio-Inspired Approaches in All Schools, written by Project Zero researchers Mara Krechevsky, Ben Mardell, Melissa Rivard, and Daniel Wilson. I feel so honored and so validated by the inclusion of my work in this book.  And what fortuitous timing of the publication of this book -- practically on the eve of my retirement!

In fact, the Wednesday Afternoon Teacher Learning Group, has had the chance to go public with our work beyond CRLS on a several occasions -- at the Documentation Studio at Wheelock College, at the Project Zero Classroom summer institute at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, through an article Jennifer Hogue and I were invited to write for an issue of Theory into Practice,** as well as on the pages of Visible Learners.  Like Scott, we've had multiple opportunities to be creative and responsive, to push ourselves and support one another to take pedagogical risks, to wear our educator hearts on our sleeves, to feel the affirming sunlight that goes along with exhibition and the authentic dialogue, community, and growth that it promotes. 

The snow is still falling; and the skies are now darker than they are in this photograph. For me personally, retiring happily required more than feeling I had done right by the students in my care.  Given my professional development role, I needed to feel that the efforts and achievements of my colleagues -- my co-inquirers -- also were adequately explored, understood, and honored.  This kind of recognition and validation, which depends on open, deep, flexible looking and listening as well as on more conventional forms of program assessment, did not happen for the CRLS Instructional Support Coaches, another group of CRLS teacher-leaders with whom I worked closely over a number of years. That group has done and continues to do important, meaningful, seldom fully examined, and thus seldom fully understood and appreciated work in supporting teachers and students -- and this does make me sad.***  But the great work of the Wednesday Afternoon Teacher Learning Group was acknowledged, respected, and celebrated, thanks to Project Zero, and the Making Learning Visible Project in particular. Maybe everyone who retires should get to do an exhibition of precious, important work -- kind of like Scott's M.F.A. show.

*http://www.online-literature.com/franz-kafka/metamorphosis/3/
** The article, "From Display to Documentation to Discourse:  The Challenge of Documentation in a High School," was published in the Winter 2010 issue.
***The rage exhausted itself a few years back.