Why retire? Well I suppose there must be many reasons but, as well as reaching retirement age, surely tiredness or stress must be among them?
Personally, I didn’t reach retirement age and I was no more tired than I had been for years and probably a bit less stressed than I had been for the few years prior to retirement. So why did I decide to go? The main reason was that I no longer enjoyed it! I had always found teenagers quite amusing and had some sympathy with their “growing-up pains”, but I got to the stage where I didn’t want to know. Some of the pupils were still delightful, but an increasing number were just a pain – meaning I was out of sympathy with their thoughts, activities and aims.
In addition, I wanted to move back to the town (well, city actually) of T and I couldn’t find the sort of teaching job there that I would consider.
Probably the final straw was when I found one of my university “gang” who was the year younger than me had been retired a while! O.K. – not a good reason, but it was the final thing to push me to go.
So – I went on the preparing for retirement course, checked that I should have enough money to live on with some over for fun things and for emergencies and handed in my notice…..
And so the new adventure started!