Goodbye Classroom, Hello Dance Floor
After three decades in the classroom, countless students, endless lesson plans, and more commencement speeches than I can count, I’ve made the biggest decision of my life: I retired from teaching to become a full-time wedding DJ. This post tells the story—why the choice came sooner than expected, the teacher who changed everything for me, and what it means to trade opening minds for moving dance floors.
September 1, 2025
And...I'm back. With big news.
During my time off from blogging, there was a lot going on in the Mostov household. But chief among the many goings-on was my decision to retire from teaching. It was a difficult decision and one that came sooner than expected.
In the past few years, my DJ business has grown so big so fast that it became increasingly difficult to maintain while teaching. DJing has long been my retirement plan, and given how lucrative it has become—I made more last year DJing than I did in my 30th year of teaching—it only made sense to invest all of my time and effort to build my brand to the fullest extent. The two jobs never played nice with one another. Late nights DJing on the weekends sometimes get me to bed as late as 3 or 4 a.m. Teaching woke me up on Monday morning at 5 a.m. I have been incredibly sleep deprived for the past couple of years. And, forced to choose between the two, I've decided to do something I never expected. I am now going to be my own boss.
I will miss teaching. It was all I ever wanted to do. I blame my senior A.P. English teacher. Lol. Brenda Neel was the best teacher I ever had. She cared so deeply about her students, and her belief in our potential, promise, and purpose was evidenced by every word of encouragement, every gesture made, and every lesson learned in her classroom. I do not know if she is aware just how important she was to me, but her enthusiasm, optimism, and dedication left me with just one goal at high school graduation: I wanted to celebrate, advocate, and empower youth like she had done for me and so many of my peers. I wanted to open minds and open hearts as a trusted adult for my own students. I wanted my students to believe in themselves as Brenda taught me to believe in myself. I figured if I was half as good as she was that I could make a real difference in the lives of my kids. I hope I succeeded.
Sadly, I missed Perry's graduation ceremony in my final year of teaching, but I can't tell you how many graduations I have sat through in the last three decades of being a teacher. I've seen thousands of students receive their diplomas. I've listened to hundreds of speakers encourage them to "sail off into the challenge of tomorrow." I've watched as countless alumni extolled the virtues of the "good ol' Alma Mater." I've observed parents desperately trying to locate their children among the assembly of young people and swelling with pride as their child's name was pronounced (or mispronounced) by the administration.
I've listened attentively as the valedictorians gave their class commencement speeches, assuring the audiences with trembling but practiced tones that this class would "make the world safe for democracy and find solutions to the economic and social ills endangering the greatest of nations."
Every graduation ends the same way. After a few hours of such excitement, the teachers wish their students well for the last time, the graduates have their pictures taken and are whisked off to their homes or restaurants for festivities, and the custodians are left alone to fold the chairs, disassemble the platform, and clean up the dropped programs and confetti.
Graduation ceremonies certainly fulfill a very important function. Aside from being a mark of achievement for the graduates, they are also an assurance to the society about to receive them that they have acquired certain basic skills. But what continues to disturb me over the years is that we are still not in agreement about what constitutes an educated person.
Should we assume that the curriculum we prescribe for our young people prepares them not only for a complex and changing world, but also how to relate to other human beings they will meet on their lives' journeys?
What about imagination and inner calm? What about happiness and enjoyment of living? What about courage and the conquest of fear? What about peace of mind, the ability to give and receive love, to feel empathy, to value, appreciate, and respect the opinions of others even if they are different from their own? What of self-confidence, self-respect, and self-discipline? What about hope for the future and contentment in later years? What about resilience, perseverance, and determination? Where does this learning fit into the definition of the intelligent human being? Perhaps we have for too long believed that such things are not in the domain of public education, that people come by them naturally and develop them in their own time and in their own way.
Declining achievement in our nation's schools has pointed up the need to reinforce basic skills. Here in Ohio, the Department of Education has never met an academic standard they didn't like, increasingly bogging down the work of educators to focus on breadth instead of depth. Teachers are told to differentiate instruction to reach all students, then mandated to teach to a standardized test year after year. Proficiency is an understandable benchmark to a very real problem. The danger lies in overreacting to it and promoting efficiency and competency as the only true objectives of our educational system.
Somewhere along the way we need to reinforce the idea that we make decisions based on feelings as well as facts. Education's ultimate objective—that we grow and become the best versions of ourselves and help others to do the same—is only partially served by teaching the three branches of reading, writing, and arithmetic. This requires us to expand our definition of education, not constrict it.
As I end my teaching career, I remain concerned for our young, educated graduates—those who, I am told, will become our leaders of tomorrow. Have we done them justice if we've prepared them only to be skilled doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, and CPAs? Will the education we've given them sustain them in an insecure economy, a world on the brink of war, a society charged with intimidation, suspicion, division, vitriol, and uncertainty? If not, we may have presented them with a diploma which will serve them for little.
As I end my teaching career, I'm still not sure what the truly educated person is, but I'm certain he or she is not dependent upon years of formal schooling. We will have been only half educated unless we have acquired survival techniques, a sense of human dignity and worth, the knowledge of how to use our limited time wisely, and the determination to leave the world a better place for our having been in it.
For my part, like Brenda before me, I hope I did right by my kids. Both in Bellefontaine and at Perry. The relationships I had with my students were always of paramount importance to me. I always made a real effort to be in the moment, to listen to them, and to give them a voice. I always wanted them to remain curious, to imagine possibilities, to recognize and fact-check propaganda, and to seek lessons that were personally meaningful and relevant to them. I always made my classroom a safe space with a zeal for life, laughter, and learning. I hope my students know how much I cared for them. I will not miss lesson planning, grading, or OTES scores. I hope I now live a life free from acronyms. I will miss the faculty and staff. I will miss the administrators with whom I worked. But most of all, I will miss my kids. I will miss teaching.
Still, I have a job to do. I am retiring from teaching, but I am not retired. Hell, I am only 52. I still have a purpose. I may no longer be opening minds, but I will be manipulating moods. And now, I will be doing it full-time. A truly great DJ, just for a moment, can make an entire room fall in love. Because DJing is not about choosing a few tunes. It is about generating shared moods; it is about understanding the feelings of a group of people and directing them to a better place. In the hands of a DJ with real music knowledge, songs create rituals of spiritual communion that can be among the most powerful events in people's lives. It's a good trade. As a teacher I was—and as a DJ, I am—a very lucky man indeed.
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