Many of us are already retired (hooray!) and many of us are soon to retire.  In 2016, I will retire from public education.  I took my present job in 1997, with intentions of staying for a few years until my daughter graduated high school and then going back into corporate libraries where I belonged.  I have always been honest with myself and others that I went into the field of education for the summers off to spend with my young daughter.  Somewhere along the way, things shifted and changed and I wound up spending nineteen wild years in a barrio school.  Early along the way I realized that I was devoted to and protective of these meddlesome, demanding but sweet little kids.

It is not easy to work in the field of public education, and it is especially hard to work in a title school where 95 percent of the population lives in poverty.  I quickly realized that not just anyone could do this.

I could, and I did.

But I am tired now, and I am ready to start the next phase of my life.  However,  I will miss a few things about working in this field, but some things I will NOT.  Here’s the rundown:

What I won’t miss:

Lunch duty every day and having first graders tug on my sleeve to inform me that Jose has tossed his cookies all over the lunch table

Being chastised for overloading the lunch trash bags

Peeling Kindergartners off their parents on the first day of school.  Worse than an octopus!

Having to glimpse plumber’s butt when the hefty students bend over

Nosebleeds like Niagara Falls

Saul, who tried to kill his mother with a knife, and then later set fire to his apartment complex (don’t worry, his mother shipped him back to Mexico.  He’s probably a junior recruit for M13 now)

Reporting to work at 7:30 a.m. and they already have too much energy

Dealing with a crying kindergartner when they misbehave and I give them the consequence

Reading the STAAR reading test questions and answer choices to the slow ones.  Did that make sense?

Playing  a paper rock scissors tournament during professional development sessions.  Then following that up with an adult relay race in the gym

Bipolar principals (it’s an epidemic ….)

Faculty meetings and the new superintendent’s 90 slide power point show (Oh, God …) about whipping the school district back into shape

Filings with Children’s Protective Services (it’s the law, folks)

Standing by and having to watch 5^th graders having new and inexperienced teachers for lunch (it’s the only way the fledglings can learn how to manage a class ….)

What I will miss

The humor of my teacher colleagues (it’s what kept us all sane) and drunken debaucheries hosted at my home

Coming to work every day  in jeans and keds

Somewhere to go every day where I know that I am making a difference

The money  (I’m so crass ….)

An entire summer off on full salary (I just said  I was crass …)

Finding out about all the awesome things my fellow librarians are accomplishing at their schools, and sometimes imitating them

Pulling together with fellow school librarians to help a high school student living in a trailer without electricity (and seeing her become an honors student accepted at community college …)

Getting to go home every day at 3:30

Playing the game of Life with gifted first graders who had never played a board game.  After that, it was all they wanted to do …

Letting my 5^th grade TV team plan the food for their own farewell party,  going out and buying it all for them, and partying down in the science lab

Doing the 911 presentation every September on our in house morning broadcast

Making my required  training  presentation on copyright law for teachers into stand up comedy  (it was just too deadly boring otherwise)

Watching the superintendent’s face when the music teacher fell asleep right in front of him as he presented at one of our faculty meetings.  We didn’t wake her up.  She falls asleep at all our faculty meetings

Watching the amazed faces of 4^th and 5^th graders when I teach them google docs for the first time

Eating the homemade tamales still hot from the steamer that the mamacitas would bring up to school

It’s been a ride.