It's The Pensioneer!

How does a teacher manage to retire at the tender age of 55? Well, first you have to work for 33 years or so in the same job in the same state at a rate of pay not commensurate with your education. Second, you have to pay 3% of your gross salary into a pension fund for the same amount of time. That pension fund is managed by the state. It grows and shrinks with the guesswork of the fund managers who get paid to make it grow as much as possible. And third, you have to live long enough to collect it.

When I made the transition from teaching in Gary to Elkhart Indiana, I met a science teacher who was battling cancer just as she was approaching retirement age. She missed a huge number of days and could have actually retired early, but she gutted it out despite her illness and stuck with it just long enough to receive her full pension. Then she died two months after she retired. I will never forget the lesson that she taught me. You take it when you can get it and you don't look back. No one is promised tomorrow.

Here's how it works: In Indiana, to receive your full pension, your years of Indiana service and your age have to add up to 85, so long as you have reached the minimum age of 55. Since I started in Indiana (after two years in Michigan) at age 24, I am hitting the sweet spot just about the moment I turn 55. So, for those of you keeping score at home, here you go: Take your years of service plus your age, subtract it from 85, and divide by 2. That will tell you how much longer you have to go before you are eligible for full retirement. You know, unless State Representative Wes Culver finally gets his way and increases it to the rule of 95, like he tried to do in 2016. There's nothing to motivate teachers like extending their careers by a mandatory five extra years!

I did the legwork with the Teacher Retirement Fund, and I will retire with about 40% of my salary intact, which means I still have to work for the other 60%. But how I look at it is, if I don't retire, I'm only working for 60% of my salary, because I'd be getting 40% of it if I just sat on the couch at home. So, it's time for me to find something else to do.

And I have some things in mind...

Endings and Beginnings

So, here I am at the end of my 32-year teaching career. It seems odd to type that. No, it seems bizarre to type that. At the end of this calendar year, I will be retired. Can I afford to be retired? Oh, heck no. I'll have to work; more on that in a minute. But my span as a full-time teacher will have come to an end, with all of the planning and data and testing behind me. I still plan to hang around. I'll be in classrooms substituting. But I won't have the day-to-day responsibilities that make the job work instead of fun.

I offer on this blog reflections on my career. Things that have come and gone, and things that have come back again; things that worked, things that didn't, and things that never will. One of the myriad impressions that I wish to change is the idea that older, more experienced teachers are all burned out; not all of us are. Some of us are still working all the time to improve and adapt to changing times. And from long experience, we have knowledge that just might be valuable to younger people just entering the profession. Don't worry, kids, we already know you think you know everything. We knew everything once too! And the more experience we got, the less we knew everything.

As I make the transition into professional development both as a former educator and a comic book creator, I also offer reflections on my life in general. I have led an interesting life, and a colorful one. I will include passages that may be troubling for some to read. I suffered from child abuse, and one of the things that helped me survive was comic books. I will write a lot about them, and what they have meant to me personally.

Come follow along as I stroll down Memory Lane on the path to Future Street!