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Friday
Okay, I’ve officially done it: I’ve notified St. Mary’s College of Maryland that I will be retiring in June 2018, which is when I turn 67. That means that I will teach eight or nine more courses (depending on how many senior projects I supervise) and then call it quits.
I have mixed feelings about the decision. I love teaching and have learned much more about literature from interacting with my students than I ever could have done on my own. Even after almost 40 years in the profession, new perspectives open up for me every time I teach a course. I wonder how I am going to compensate for that.
On the other hand, ends of semesters have become increasingly difficult. I spent practically every moment of this past Thanksgiving vacation reading student essays—after all these years, a 5-7 page essay still takes me 30-40 minutes to grade–and then the following two weeks were filled with individual student conferences. Everything that wasn’t related to teaching got put on hold. No time for reading, for meeting with friends, for tennis, for anything, really.
This, of course, is what insures the quality of small liberal arts colleges and also make them expensive. The attention we pay to individual students requires small classes (my average class size is 15-18) and can never be automated. In every essay I receive, I look for the special connection between work and student. It’s not always clear—the essays are often a mess because writing is hard—but once I figure it out, I can provide the feedback the student needs to write a good revision. The revision conferences are among the most profound interactions I have with students.
I don’t begrudge the time. I couldn’t have asked for a better job. It’s just that it’s time to do something else. And time to open up a slot for a newly minted Ph.D.
Of course, I bring some of the time pressures on myself by writing daily essays for Better Living through Beowulf. Given that the essay writing makes me a better teacher and gives me a chance to acknowledge my students’ ideas, however, the blog essays seem essential. Furthermore, they will give me something to do once I retire.
The time spent reading student essays is not the only reason to retire. I miss Julia, who has been spending half her time supporting my mother in Sewanee, Tennessee and half her time in Suwanee, Georgia doing “granny care” with our three grandchildren. I’m ready to spend much more time with her.
With a retirement date in my sights, I am looking almost nostalgically at the final courses I will teach at St. Mary’s. I will teach my beloved “Restoration and 18th Century Couples Comedy” course once more and also my “Theories of the Reader” senior seminar. I plan one new course, “Five Masterpieces of Magical Realism,” in which I will probably teach Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Isabel Allende’s House of Spirits, and Haruki Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I’ll also teach British Fantasy, Introduction to Literature (with an Environmental Studies focus), British Literature I, a first year seminar (either Murakami or Jane Austen), and one or two others. Each of these courses is precious to me.
I’m still don’t know what I think about retirement. I’m not quite at the stage of William Savage Landor’s dying philosopher: “The fire is low and I am ready to depart.” I don’t quite see myself, to borrow from Longfellow, folding my tent like the Arabs and quietly stealing away.
But I’m also not going to be pulling a Tennysonian Ulysses and start complaining about an aged wife and a stale domestic life. I don’t see myself smiting sounding furrows and getting washed down by gulfs.
I’m envisioning something in between. I’ll let you know how it turns out.
