Why I Stopped Teaching and Don’t Miss It

I retired from college teaching three years ago. I taught at Indiana University at Bloomington for 33 years and, as a teacher, I was much lauded by students, colleagues, and pedagogy experts. When I stopped teaching, I thought that I would miss it terribly but the reality has proved different.

In fact, for most of my academic career, I intended to never retire from teaching. Federal law allows tenured professors to continue working past the regular retirement age and I had planned to do so. Unfortunately, in 2001, I was diagnosed with a serious heart ailment and, upon my wife’s urging, I met with a personnel officer to discuss my university’s special retirement package for longtime faculty members.

I learned that if I continued to teach full time at Indiana -- and I wanted to -- I would work on regular salary and lose the special retirement option. But if I would retire permanently, effective in May 2004, Indiana would give me approximately 85 percent of my final salary for the first five years of my retirement.

The use-it-or-lose-it package would also allow me to teach at another college during those years (excepting public institutions in Indiana). It even included university payments into my retirement fund and I would not have to start drawing on that until the five years were over.

Still I hesitated. I worried that I would miss the social interaction of the classroom, the exchange of ideas with students, and the weird and wonderful sparks that fly in a successful course.

I had observed the physical and mental decline of some of my colleagues who had taken the special retirement package, and the continued good health of those who had chosen to keep teaching. My health had stabilized and my doctor thought that I could continue at Indiana for many years -- although he and my wife preferred that I not.

One Sunday afternoon, while mulling over the problem, I reached a decision. It was a beautiful, sunny spring day in southern Indiana, one of the first after a long, gray winter. I was sitting outside reading The New York Times.

I wanted to finish doing that and then take a long walk. But the alarm on my watch sounded and I had to stop everything and go inside to work on a tall stack of student papers.

As I slowly went through them, not enjoying this necessary aspect of teaching, I realized that if I did not take the retirement package and continued teaching, on a future sunny Sunday afternoon, I would be correcting papers for about 15 cents on the dollar. And if I did that, I would be the biggest schmuck in America.

The next day, I told my department chair that I would be leaving the university in May of 2004.

After retiring, my wife and I moved back to the San Francisco Bay area (she grew up in Oakland and we met at the University of California at Berkeley). I planned on trying to obtain a part-time teaching job, but first I wanted to take a year off and read all the books and articles that had piled up in the corner of my office during the past decade.

In addition, I wanted to work on a number of writing projects, and I had a full calendar of invitations to speak to various professional organizations and at many campuses. The year passed quickly and so did a second one -- which included extended travel in Europe that I had long wanted to do.

When the third year started, I thought about applying for a part-time teaching position -- although most of the ones I saw listed seemed rather exploitative and I did not need the money.

Then I realized that what I also did not need were the many commitments that go along with teaching.

Not only showing up on time for class and office hours -- some of my colleagues never mastered that aspect of the job -- but also keeping all the extra appointments and study sessions with students, listening to ridiculous excuses, dealing with plagiarism, etc., etc. I had been free of all that for more than two years and returning to it did not make a lot of sense to me.

I also recalled that, during my first years of teaching, I had discovered that in a class of, say, 25 students, usually five of them required as much time and attention as the other 20. Those five were often a mixture of the very bright and troubled, and the not-at-all bright and troubled.

Those five -- and the number increased or decreased according to the size of the class -- sucked up an enormous amount of my time and energy, and I did not miss those students at all.

I did enjoy tutoring and advising good students but, in a sense, I have never stopped doing that: I have some students with whom I have worked for years and, in the Internet age, it is easy to receive and comment upon their work. And I have more time to do that than ever before.

But I did miss something specific about academe. Last year, I frequently went to Berkeley to do research in the library, and felt very nostalgic about my days as a graduate student there and about the classes and teachers I had encountered. One day, I happened to browse in the French section of the library and found a textbook that I had used as a graduate student. On the spot, I decided to study French again -- in part because I want to spend more time in Quebec and France, but also to finish mastering a subject that I had left behind.

I had once been almost fluent in the language (I’m from Montreal, and lived in France after graduate school), but I had lost much of my French over the years. And I had never learned to write French well. So I decided to study the language again. The French courses at Berkeley were full, and so I enrolled in French grammar and conversation courses at Alliance Française in San Francisco.

I never thought I would enjoy studying French grammar but I do. For one thing, I am learning for the pure joy of learning, not to pass a course or a graduate-school exam. I’m trying to master French grammar for its own sake and, ironically, learning it much more thoroughly than I did during the previous times I grappled with it. (The last time was in graduate school, where I learned just enough to pass the required translation exam.)

An ancillary benefit of my return to French is that, as I master the grammar, I feel more competent in other areas of my life. Growing old is not fun, and forgetting important, and even unimportant, things is frustrating.

On a recent day, I put a large check for a medical bill in the junk-mail envelope of a magazine subscription company and mailed it; when I became aware of my blunder, I was annoyed and slightly depressed. I then had to go to the bank to stop payment on the check, and pay the bank an outrageous fee for that.

But then it was time to prepare for French class. I started with my French flash cards and rattled off the answer to: “What are eight grammatical situations in which the definite article is not used?”

So, instead of feeling stupid and incompetent that day, I felt good about my increasing mastery of French grammar, with its many twists and arcane turns.

I am now in my third Alliance Française semester. As much as I enjoy being a student, I also enjoy not being the teacher, and not having the responsibility of keeping the class moving. Most of my teachers have been good, but a few are young and inexperienced. Sometimes I try to help them out by speaking up and breaking awkward silences. Other times I just sit back and observe as students have done through millennia. It is a luxury that I had forgotten about during my many years of teaching.

So it turns out that what I love most about academe is not teaching but learning.

In fact, as I look back, my best moments as a professor in the classroom occurred when I learned something new, when a student made me see something familiar in a new way. Unfortunately, those moments did not occur frequently enough.

The pressure to teach what you know well is relentless; indeed, the university pays teachers to do exactly that. However, that payment precludes professors from doing the kind of learning that a student gets to do. And I wanted to return to that learning. It just took me a while to figure that out.

I remember at Indiana, at the end of my last class in my last course, a student asked what I would do in retirement. I flippantly replied, “Maybe I’ll become a student again and study lots of things that I never had a chance to study before.”

He and most of the other students were flabbergasted. They said that they could not believe that anyone would want to become a student again -- they could not wait to graduate and leave school forever.

I see now that my off-the-cuff answer masked a deep personal truth. For beyond French grammar lies French history and civilization. And then there is German to regain -- I once could read it quite well and even speak eine kleine . . .