The Comfortable Fit

August is a strange time of year to be thinking about winter coats, yet here I am.

The coat that keeps coming to mind I remember as having shaggy purple fur, a hood with a fringe of white, and deep pockets for tucking my hands into on a cold day.  I loved that coat. It fit perfectly, loose but still warm and cozy.  I wore it for most of my early elementary years until my Grandpa Ollgaard noted it was looking a little “tired” and the sleeves were getting short on me.  And so my grandparents and I headed to the Sears in Grand Rapids to look for new winter wear.  I came home with a beautiful new coat.  I remember that one, too.  Red with a little Scandinavian detailing along the zipper line, and it was long, almost coming to my knees.  The coat was perfect on a hanger.  Sadly, this new red coat, I soon discovered, was stiff and uncomfortable.   The length made it hard to run and play.  The rigid material of the coat made it challenging to even bend my arms.  I missed my old purple coat.  Even though my purple coat no longer fit just right or even looked very good to others, I pulled it back out of the closet and continued wearing it–long after I should’ve retired it.  Retired?  That’s why the old purple coat keeps popping to mind!  It’s the looming thought of retiring…

The year I turned forty, it started.  People began asking every now and then, “So how many more years do you have left?”  The countdown to my retirement had begun!  It was astounding–unsettling, really.  I felt like I’d only just reached my stride in teaching and was finally at the better end of our pay scale.  At that time, I still had twelve years until I reached thirty years of service.  Each year the inquiries grew, and the year I had my stroke, the questioning compounded with some friends even pleading with me to take early retirement.

I get it.  I can see how it might seem like I’ve outgrown this work that has been reduced to reading from a script in prepared resources.  One artist friend of mine, a former teacher herself, advised me to start something new.  She said it first, “You don’t fit there anymore.”   My extended family will see me at the holidays and shake their heads saying, “It’s terrible what’s happened in education.  You need to get out.”  They aren’t wrong, but there are just a couple things I haven’t outgrown and a couple things government policy and feverish testing have not changed.  The kids and that excitement for learning something new, discovering the unknown.  I can’t get enough of those two things.

So even though I don’t seem to fit perfectly in this new landscape of public education, and the idea of being a teacher isn’t very appealing to those on the outside, reading snippets on education in their newsfeed, I will slip back into my classroom and prepare for another school year with my 6th and 7th grade students.  It’s comfortable and I still love it.

It’s a “purple coat” kind of career.

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