A New Chapter – Part 1

In March 2026, after twenty-four years of teaching, my long tenure at the school where I spent my career came to an end. The months leading up to this were an arduous period of transition, involving internal processes that eventually led to my departure. While the substance of those matters remains private, it was inevitable that the shift would ripple through the community.

For more than a month now, I have been rehearsing what it means to be retired. I wake up, make coffee, see my wife off to work, and then I face a full day… of nothing. It probably sounds nice to many who are still caught in the grind—to my colleagues who are grading papers and writing report card comments. But the free hours of an entire day don’t feel earned like they do at the end of a work week. These days are no longer rewards; they are chunks of time punctuated by the walking of the dog, the arrival of the mail, and the shift in the angle of sunlight through the window. The biggest moment of my day is my wife’s triumphant return from work, a tired champion who braved the outside world. 

I have been healing my raw nerves. Like skinned knees, they have run the course of drying out and scabbing over to reveal a new sheath of fresh bark. During this time, messages have trickled in steadily. I am astonished by the students, alums, and colleagues who take a moment to compose a message to someone no longer among them. There are letters written in bursts of different colored pens, emails sent to my wife, and texts from colleagues full of resolve that we won’t lose touch.

Students, alums, and colleagues  have expressed a certainty within the uncertainty, and many of the messages have started with “I don’t know what happened,” or “I know you have been going through something for a while now,” or “It has been painful to see you sad for song long,” but all of the messages have ended with support and love. I am simply grateful to everyone for their confidence in my intentions as an educator. I always planned to teach until I retired, and this sudden change has tossed me into a great deal of uncertainty.

However, as I come out of the shock of starting over, I am beginning to see an opportunity. This has forced a break from a world that is becoming increasingly fraught with anxiety. As a teacher, I felt more and more that the focus was shifting away from the traditional goal of inspiring a love for history. In the end, the landscape felt defined by risk management. Where faculty meetings were once about pedagogy and learning styles, they are now often devoted to formalized boundary training.

While clear boundaries are essential, the way they are implemented today represents a significant departure from the trust-based culture I cherished earlier in my career. When these spaces are explicitly mandated and constantly monitored, the organic trust between teacher and student can feel strained, and this is to say nothing of that between the school administration and the teachers.

The following series of blog entries will be my attempt to reflect on this transition. My aim isn't to rehash the specifics of internal disagreements, but to analyze the quality that informed everything I did: trust. I have always held this trust to be a sacred bond based on the special care that a teacher has for their students and on an administration’s desire to nurture its teachers so that they can be inspiring.

The opportunity before me is twofold. The first is to move beyond the high-stakes world of modern independent education where a teacher must also be a counselor, a caregiver, a social worker, and so much more. The second is to look back from the outside—to tell stories, invite discussion, and find some kind of understanding of the times in which we are living. That is the aim of this blog.