Books, Books, Books!

by Julie Hanks

I started work at 15, and I figured I would retire at the ripe old age of 65. I didn’t make it to 65, but I don’t even feel guilty. To get through college I worked two sometimes three jobs. I was fired from most of my waitress jobs, including Howard Johnsons where I tried to form a union because the manager insisted upon giving “students” split shifts. I was not successful.

Thank goodness, I finally found a great college in which to teach with a strong union that enabled me to retire without medical and financial concerns. At 64, I find myself doing everything I ever dreamed a woman of leisure would do. I was able to spend time working on the passage of Prop. 30 and the re-election of President Obama, and I can stay up all night reading a great book and sleeping in the next day, everyday—not just on week-ends. I can volunteer any day anywhere and not have to cancel at the last minute because I am too tired. I am catching up on long, relaxing lunches with friends and not having to feel guilty about the stacks of essays or journals waiting at my home. I am even going to receive an award for my union work and don’t have to go looking frazzled because it is a Friday.

I loved every one of my 40ish years of teaching. I taught the following: elementary grades (my last 1st/2nd classroom was across the street from a crackhouse), University of New Mexico graduate and undergraduate students, teachers on Indian reservations, and students at the community college level for 22 years. I worked on almost a dozen accreditations, including Zuni Pueblo in New Mexico and the College of the Marshall Islands in the Marshall Islands I loved it all. Even though recurring health issues often compromised my teaching, I still woke up every day thinking, thank goodness I am a teacher. Teaching is the only career I ever wanted, and during all my years of teaching, I was always in the union. I marched for better wages, wrote letters for improved educational instruction, and visited the capitals of various states to speak my concerns.

Because of our great union, CCFT, as a retiree I am able to enjoy life. I am gardening, exercising my bad knee to dance again, going to lectures, traveling, playing with my dog, spending time with my grandchildren, and writing. I rediscovered a project I started 40 years ago, a children’s book based on an ethnographic study Bess Lomax Hawes did in the LAPSD. She recorded elementary black girls handclapping and singing during recess. I am finally completing the project and hope to publish it.

Gratefully, teaching never ends—even in retirement. My former students, now teachers or future teachers, are calling me to help them in their studies or their own classrooms. I am volunteering at a middle school to create a unit on the Holocaust. With another student I am sharing my experience in classroom environments and helping her understand the importance of learning centers and individualized learning. In the fall, I will be teaching one REAL class with Joseph Carter, but only one, not five! Oh, yes, I am the “official editor” of my daughter’s dissertation, keeping up in educational trends through her hard work.

Books, books, books! I have three rooms packed with them from my two offices. I have read 80% of them, but so many keep on coming out! As soon as I finish one, I record it in my book journal, think about it, reflect, research the author. Hmmmmmm, and then I start a new one. I am a very eclectic reader, and I have a plethora of genres. I still read some brain candy: mysteries, sleazy westerns, and an occasional romance. I also read a Classic every month—this month I want to revisit Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. This past week, I read The Healer by Jonathan Odell, and I am about a third of the way through In the Garden of Beast: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin by Erik Larson who wrote Devil in the White City

The Healer is about Granada, a “healer and midwife” who survives slavery and lives into the 1930s. Written so well, the critics mistakenly describe Odell as an African American. In telling the story of Granada and Polly Shine, the book graphically describes the anguish and hopelessness of the slaves of this Mississippi plantation as well as unbreakable bonds and the power to heal. Though the slaves languish with overwork, disease, and despair, there is hope with the arrival and abrupt departure of Granada’s mentor, Polly Shine. The Healer is one more excellent book with the research and citations to support Odell’s descriptions of the insidious institution of slavery. The characters are well developed and rich—I did not want to say good-bye to any of them.

Completely different is In the Garden of Beast: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin by Erik Larson who wrote Devil in the White City. This nonfiction book is about the last diplomatic ambassador to Berlin before World War II, William E. Dodd. The book describes the Dodd’s family and their interactions with the evolving dictatorship until they become inundated with the overwhelming evil surfacing about them. Though at first they find the diplomatic officers attending the dinners bewitching and handsome in their black uniforms and decorum, these SS Officers soon reveal their nefarious goals. And, in addition to the horrific anti-Semitism of the Germans, the anti-Semitism of Roosevelt and many of his Cabinet becomes apparent as well. A fascinating book!

Okay, I can’t help it—I’m ending this by reviewing books, because I was/am/always will be a READING TEACHER! To those of you reading this, I say, support your college, support your integrity as a professional educator, and support your union, and don’t forget to read a good book.

 

Life After Retirement: Allan Lönnberg and Donna Mekis