Sometimes I lament about leaving my career behind; this seems to worry my husband who will then ask if I’m going back. My answer is solid: no, I’m not going back to teaching!
However, I have to figure out how to maintain my skills. That’s a tough one.
Since I was in the Student Success world for almost 15 years, I really became a bit of a jack-of-all-trades, especially through credit recovery: English (9 and 10, especially), ESL (almost all levels), Civics, Careers, Food and Nutrition, grade 9 Math (if you can believe that), French (not good enough to do anything with it). I even taught a new course in my last year (English Literacy Skills). I became very fascinated with reading skills.
Despite all those subjects, it’s really my history connections I want to maintain the most as that’s truly where my heart is! I have to say that my fantastic grade 11 and 12 world history classes this year brought that point home to me very strongly.
I will do some more work for the Champlain Society Education Committee for sure. I may reach out to OHASSTA again. Technically, I am still in the process of closing down THHSSSC (the old Toronto History, Humanities, and Social Science Subject Council) by distributing our funds. That will run into the fall, for sure, since some schools never even replied when I reached out to them. I’d like to make new connections at OISE to see if I can get some face time with teacher candidates through the history profs there (given that I had a lot of student teachers and did a really thorough job with them, if I may say so).
Lots of possibilities, aside from potential Student Success work through the OT list at TDSB. NO regular classroom supply work though. That is for sure!!!
I’m still not ready to process my career, at least publicly. In private, I had many hours to ponder the decades behind me as I sat beside my old file cabinets and kept or tossed piles and piles of student essays and projects. I couldn’t bring them all home, so I kept the ones that were near and dear to my heart!
For now, there’s gardening to be done, Blueberry to ride, Val to spend time with, pilates to do and painting to re-start!
And the cats, of course.
