A Year Outside the Classroom

Celebrating my birthday at Starflyer Brewing Company this year.

I celebrated my 53rd birthday this evening while hosting DJ Trivia at Starflyer Brewing Co. As birthdays go, this one was fairly uneventful. Not bad, exactly. Just uneventful. I spent my birthday asking people questions, keeping score, playing music, awarding prizes, and pretending, with moderate success, that I was not another year older and one year closer to death. The players did sing “Happy Birthday” to me between rounds, which was very kind and much appreciated. No one bought me a beer, though. I was hoping, but no such luck. I Doordashed Pizza Oven, spiked my sugar, then topped it off with a flight before leaving the brewery. As far as birthdays go, today was a depressing reminder of middle age and an incredibly accurate one.

When I got home, Gail was already asleep. Ben, my younger son who still lives with us, was already asleep. The house was quiet, and the day was was nearing its climax. If not for a birthday phone call from my older son, Joel, in Cincinnati, it is likely I would have forgotten it even was my birthday today. No cake, no candles, no gifts. My inner child spent another year sulking as he has every May 14 since the mid-'90s. In truth, birthdays are always lackluster now—interrupters at best—and inconvenient reminders that my body no longer works as it should. I have reached the age where I have the sense of humor of a twelve-year-old, the mind of a 30 year old, and a body that died in the Civil War. But I am also a realist. Birthdays do not need to be productions. More often than not, they are just days that quietly ask you to take inventory.

And this birthday, perhaps more than most, has given me plenty to think about.

Roughly one year ago, I retired from teaching after thirty years in the classroom.

That still feels strange to write. For most of my adult life, teaching was not merely my job. It was part of my identity. It shaped the calendar of my life, the rhythm of my weeks, and the way I understood my purpose. August meant preparation. September meant beginnings. May meant exhaustion, reflection, and graduation. The school year moved with a rhythm that became so familiar I rarely stopped to consider how much of my life was organized around it. Even my DJ business, which had been growing for years, had to fit itself around teaching. Weddings happened on weekends. Meetings with my couples happened when I could squeeze them in. Emails were answered late at night. Wedding planning was done in the small spaces between grading, lesson planning, faculty meetings, and professional development. In the last few years of my teaching career, my DJ business had grown so big so fast that it became increasingly difficult to maintain while teaching.

DJing had long been my retirement plan, and given how lucrative it had become—I made more in my final full year of DJing part-time than I did in my 30th year of teaching—it only made sense to invest all of my time and effort into building my brand to the fullest extent. The two jobs never played nice with one another. Late nights DJing on the weekends sometimes got me to bed as late as 3 or 4 a.m., and teaching woke me up on Monday morning at 5 a.m. I had been incredibly sleep deprived for the last few years of my teaching career. And, forced to choose between the two, I decided to do something I never expected. I retired from the classroom, and I became my own boss.

One year later, that last sentence feels both ordinary and astonishing.

I am my own boss.

That means I answer the emails, schedule the meetings, build the website, write the blog posts, prepare the music, maintain the equipment, handle the marketing, run the trivia, meet the couples, load the vehicle, unload the vehicle, set up the gear, tear down the gear, manage the timelines, solve the problems, and carry the weight of every decision myself. Retirement, as it turns out, has not made me less busy. If anything, I am busier now running my DJ business full-time than I ever was when I was teaching and DJing simultaneously, which seems impossible and yet is absolutely true. The difference is that this work belongs entirely to me. Every success is mine. Every mistake is mine. Every risk is mine. Every long night is mine. There is something both terrifying and exhilarating about that.

I will also admit that sleeping in has been glorious.

I do not want to sound overly dramatic, but sleep may be the most underrated luxury in the known universe. For years, I worked weddings on Saturday nights, often driving home in the early hours of Sunday morning, unloading equipment, crawling into bed, and then dragging myself through the beginning of another school week. I did it so long that it began to feel normal, which is how people justify all kinds of ridiculous things. A year removed from that schedule, I can say with confidence that it was not normal. It was madness. And, at times, it was evil. These days, if I do not have a morning meeting, I wake up when my body decides it is finished sleeping. At 53 years old, that feels like a birthday gift I gave myself a year early.

What has surprised me most, though, is not the sleeping. It is not the absence of grading, differentiated instruction, standardized testing, OTES scores, or the endless educational acronyms I hope never to hear again. What has surprised me most is how little time I have spent thinking about the fact that school went on without me. I expected August to feel strange. I expected the first day of school to hit me harder than it did. I expected graduation season to stir something in me. Instead, the school year came and went. Teachers taught. Students learned. Bells rang. Seniors graduated. And while all of that was happening, I was helping couples plan weddings, hosting trivia, building a website, writing more than I have written in years, and taking part in the weddings of so many extraordinary couples that I have barely had time to look backward.

That does not mean I do not miss teaching.

I do.

Or, perhaps more accurately, I miss my students.

The rest of it? I haven't given it any thought in the last year, which makes me feel guilty at times because teaching was all I ever wanted to do. I blame my senior A.P. English teacher for that. 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.

A year removed from the classroom, and right now as I write this post, I am thinking about the graduations for the first time since packing up my classroom . Sadly, I missed Perry's graduation ceremony in my final year of teaching, but I can't tell you how many graduations I 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—more often 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, even one year removed from the classroom, 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.

A year after ending 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.

A year after ending 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 do not miss lesson planning, grading, or OTES scores. I hope I now live a life free from all acronyms ("DJ" being the lone exception).

Still, I have a job to do. For the past year, so many people have congratulated me on my retirement. I retired from teaching, but I am not retired. Hell, I am only 53. I may no longer be opening minds, but I am manipulating moods. And now, I am 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.

A year ago, I wondered if leaving teaching would feel like losing a part of myself. It did not. Not in the way I feared. The part of myself that cared about people, that wanted to guide them, listen to them, read the room, meet them where they were, and help move them somewhere better did not retire. It simply changed rooms. The classroom gave way to the dance floor. The lesson plan gave way to the timeline. The bell schedule gave way to the wedding reception. The students gave way to couples, families, friends, parents, grandparents, flower girls, ring bearers, bridesmaids, groomsmen, and that one uncle who always believes he knows exactly what song will "get everyone going."

He is usually wrong. But I digress...

The work is still human work. That is what I did not fully understand a year ago. I thought I was leaving one purpose to pursue another. In reality, the purpose remained more familiar than I expected. I still spend my life trying to understand people. I still try to create moments that matter. I still try to make people feel seen, heard, celebrated, and connected. The tools have changed, but the impulse behind the work has not.

So today, on my 53rd birthday, after a night of trivia, DoorDash, no cake, and a house full of sleeping people, I find myself oddly grateful. Not because the day itself was extraordinary. It wasn't. Not because retirement has been easy. It hasn't. Not because running a business is less demanding than teaching. It absolutely is not. But because I have had the privilege of spending my life doing work that matters to me. For thirty years, I stood in front of students and tried to help them discover who they were becoming. Now I stand behind a DJ booth and help couples celebrate who they have found in one another.

It's a good trade.

As a teacher I was—and as a DJ, I am—a very lucky man indeed.

How long I can continue doing this work before my body buckles under the weight of subwoofers...that is a question I will answer when the time comes. But this year—year 53—is not the year. And that makes this birthday happy.

If only I had a piece of cake...

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