Teaching Then and Now

Horace Mann has been providing insurance and investment services to teachers for 70 years.  I am a customer.  I received this celebratory flyer from the company and I was immediately transported back many years.  There I stand at the front of the classroom in the old Tipton High School building, these rows of desks fastened to runners such that the custodian can sweep, move the row, sweep, oil the wooden floors.  Each  morning the rows are a few feet left or right of the position they occupied the previous day.

The slate boards, the chalk rails, the blonde maple teacher's desk all as they were when they represented the furnishings in my fiefdom.

Now if you read my scrawls on the advertisement you might mistakenly conclude that I did not like my job.  But if you have been reading String Too Short to Tie for any length of time you know that I considered my job as a teacher to be the best job in the world.  Of course, that includes my tasks as a teacher from the office as principal of a school in the last eighteen years of my career.  Anyway, the reason I am happy that someone else is now occupying the teaching position is that teaching and life itself are ever-changing.  It is not that I would not appreciate the new technologies or even new techniques, but rather it is the case that we serve during a season of service in our lives, then we pass the torch on to the young, to those with the strength, enthusiasm, and endurance to carry on with the task.

Bless you, teachers, wherever you practice your art.  I would not trade places with you.  Nor, I think, would you want to trade with me.  It's all good.