Retirement Job, September 2006

I retired five years ago.  There was a roast in my honor.  Many of you were there.  Dear friends said sweet, sarcastic, and potentially libelous things about me.  It was at a Holiday Inn in Bloomington.  People had a choice of fish or chicken.  I had the fish.  I moved to Southern California to be near family and to frolic at the beach.  So what am I doing standing in front of five classes of high school juniors, with chalk dust on my pants and crib notes about Vasco da Gama in my hands?

For the next four months I am living out an admittedly pedestrian fantasy.  While a very good U.S. History teacher is on maternity leave, I am her substitute.  I’m facing short-term responsibility and an opportunity to match wits with wise-guy high school students.  There is some form of poetic justice or irony in my teaching three AP (advance placement) classes, as I never reached that tier in my checkered high school career. It is early yet, but so far I love the challenge.

Our initial goal has been to understand immigration.  The first assignment was to research how the students’ families came to California.  The Philippines, Cuba, Poland, Africa, Mexico, Finland, Guatemala, France, India, Minnesota (!) and the Pacific Rim countries were all represented.  The richness of their life experiences is staggering.

In my sillier moments (which come just after mental exhaustion and  just before drooling on myself) I make up multiple choice questions too ridiculous to share with my students.  For example:

Lewis and Clark:

a)      Bickered the entire trip over who should get top billing

b)      Ended up working the supper club circuit in the Midwest

c)      Sent prank smoke signals to President Jefferson along the way

d)     Amused their men around the campfire with dead-on impressions of George Washington

e)      Neglected  to ask for receipts along the way, and were disappointed to discover much of their trip was not tax deductible

Attempting to stay ahead is daunting.  Concepts I spent hours cobbling together are twisted, turned, and solved in minutes by the whiz-kid students.  They are young and eager to learn. I am old and grizzled.  The biggest change is within me: I do not feel the need to be right or popular.  I am not angling for a long-term assignment.  Age is freeing, and the students seem to be responding well.  They are welcome to anything I have picked up in my wanderings.  Decades ago they dropped by conspiratorially to share the irreverence of Monty Python; later it was The Simpsons.  Now it’s something having to do with you tube.  I don’t understand it yet, but they will teach me.

Tom H. Cook is still a Twins fan and hopes they are still alive for the wild card as you read this.  He’s cutting this column short because he has a lot of homework to do.