Most people outside education don't see it as stressful. They seem to think "summers off" and working with kids day in and day out is a cake walk. Far from it. I know more teachers with serious physical ailments who stay teaching because they cannot afford to retire than I can count. We have a teacher in a wheelchair due to debilitating rhumatoid arthritis. We have several teachers that are diabetic. Many teachers have hypertension (myself included) and the rushed pace of 15 minute lunches and meeting and deadlines are a pretty deadly combination. Many of our teachers are female, most are out of shape, many are single. They are stuck. Luckily I am married so I still have maybe eight more years in class, if I can hang on and they don't cancel art in schools. My worst nightmare is what happened to a teacher in our area. She was in her last year of teaching and was grading at school one night and died of a heart attack only to be found by students coming for early morning tutorials. That is no way to make an exit.
Darren A few years ago our Command Executive Officer (CXO, the senior civilian in our reserve unit) retired from the civil service and last February he retired from the USAR as a CW4. He had set himself up as an aide to a local business association for his retirement job. I think he had just received his first reserve retirement check when he and his wife went out to dinner and he ate some raw oysters. He was dead in just over a week from a viral infection. Scary. I used to say of him he was the kind of guy who would be dead in a week if he wasn’t working, the Type A personality. I hope I go a few years beyond January 2025.
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Most people outside education don't see it as stressful. They seem to think "summers off" and working with kids day in and day out is a cake walk. Far from it. I know more teachers with serious physical ailments who stay teaching because they cannot afford to retire than I can count. We have a teacher in a wheelchair due to debilitating rhumatoid arthritis. We have several teachers that are diabetic. Many teachers have hypertension (myself included) and the rushed pace of 15 minute lunches and meeting and deadlines are a pretty deadly combination. Many of our teachers are female, most are out of shape, many are single. They are stuck. Luckily I am married so I still have maybe eight more years in class, if I can hang on and they don't cancel art in schools. My worst nightmare is what happened to a teacher in our area. She was in her last year of teaching and was grading at school one night and died of a heart attack only to be found by students coming for early morning tutorials. That is no way to make an exit.
Darren
A few years ago our Command Executive Officer (CXO, the senior civilian in our reserve unit) retired from the civil service and last February he retired from the USAR as a CW4. He had set himself up as an aide to a local business association for his retirement job. I think he had just received his first reserve retirement check when he and his wife went out to dinner and he ate some raw oysters. He was dead in just over a week from a viral infection.
Scary. I used to say of him he was the kind of guy who would be dead in a week if he wasn’t working, the Type A personality.
I hope I go a few years beyond January 2025.
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