Tag Archives: inspiration

Teach your Children Well – – –

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Jack just makes it in time – –

I taught an on-line class yesterday morning and it brought back many memories.

To explain – –

I taught classes in a Scottish college for over twenty years starting with apprentice house painters and ending with management students. I had the opportunity to retire at either age 60 or 65 and might have gone on to 65 if only for the sheer pleasure of actually teaching. But the bureaucracy and paper work was so awful that I chose 60 and don’t regret it.

However, I never lost the pleasure of actually helping a group of people to navigate their learning experiences and I’ve been lucky to continue to be able do that.

Following retirement, I was contracted as a consultant and taught classes in lots of exotic places, then after moving to the US it was mostly more about Scottish culture, language and music.

Sometimes this was very informal just sitting down with friends and sometimes much more academic in lecture halls or classrooms.

In some ways performing as a singer for audiences gave me more confidence to do something similar in front of a group of students. Eventually, I think, it worked the other way too.

The two big role models in my teenage years were both teachers – George Simpson was the woodwork teacher at the high school I attended and Jim Yeats was the newly appointed young painting instructor when I moved on to the local college as part of my apprenticeship as a house painter. If I saw them walking in town and they said hello I felt like I was walking on air!

So if I managed to be a role model myself, then I’ll be well satisfied!

Retirement – Bah, Humbug – –

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Jack gets over the line in time again – –

There’s an old saying that you die three times – if you’re interested you can search on-line.

It’s the same with retirement!

I retired from my college job in Scotland when I was sixty in 2002, but not really as I was immediately head-hunted as a training consultant by three different organizations and continued to do that until I moved here to the US.

For a couple of years I really did retire, but then we moved to Big Stone Gap and opened a bookstore. While Wendy was out establishing her health support non-profit and fighting the dragons of the US for-profit health industry, I worked the bookstore. It was a big old building, so I had a fair amount of maintenance to handle, but I had also been invited to start a weekly Celtic music radio show by the local NPR station. Because we lived in the bookstore building we ran regular evening events and had a café run by a friend. So not much retirement – –

We moved to Wytheville five years ago to a house that’s even older and has had many ‘interesting’ additions over the years and has a much bigger backyard. Meanwhile Wendy is at least five years away from retirement and still busy with at least three different jobs!

So I may actually be retired now but I’m still producing and presenting my radio show, still trying to keep the house maintained, still organizing small group tours of Scotland and finding my feet as a house-husband.

As I often say to friends who say they’re looking forward to retiring – “there ain’t no such thing – it don’t exist – it’s all a hoax!

I better bring the washing in from the line now – – –