Some days I envy my retired colleagues who will never again have to sit in a stuffy room full of committee members haggling over whether to hand prize-winners their certificates in paper folders or to get them framed. (The certificates, not the prize-winners--but either way, I didn't get a PhD because I wanted to bite my tongue and roll my eyes through a discussion of picture frames.)
Emeritus faculty members don't have to wonder where the toner cartridges are stored or who is responsible for ordering replacements now that we have no administrative assistants, and neither do they have to keep saying "I don't know" when students ask perfectly reasonable questions about where they should go to get certain types of help. But they also don't get to stand in front of a room full of students and see that first-day-of-class look in their eyes, that distinctive mixture of excitement and fear and fatigue (already!).
When I'm retired I won't have the privilege of posing compelling questions and then watching while students diligently scribble out their responses, but then I also won't experience the frustration of trying to decipher their handwriting. Is that word radon? Ramen? Oh--it's random!
When I'm retired I won't have to remind students that the literary works we read are not produced by a random-word generator and that, indeed, the words appear where they do because someone decided to put them there, so maybe instead of dismissing them as random we ought to work on discerning what relationship the words bear to one another and what conclusions we can draw from their placement.
When I'm retired I'll never again have to rail against the use of random and relatable and like, really confusing as if they meant anything other than here's how the reading made me feel, but then again I won't have any reason to introduce students to literary works that make them feel confused and then watch their eyes light up as understanding creeps in.
Some days I'd really like to be as far from campus as possible pursuing the unbothered life of the retired academic. Today, though, with my classroom full of students, there's nowhere I'd rather be than right here.