Please do not be offended if I decline your kind invitation…

I retired from my Teaching Office at the University of Cambridge at the end of September 2020. I could in principle have continued in post for another six years till my State Pension is payable. Instead, I made a deliberate decision to retire at age 60, despite not being required to.

Teaching is a privilege

This was not (initially at least) an easy decision, as I very much valued my job, and have felt very privileged to have been able to teach at Cambridge (and before that at Haywood Comprehensive School,  Mayflower Comprehensive School, and Havering College of Further and Higher Education). There was a time when I would not have expected that I would ever have considered leaving office until I had no choice but to retire.

Retiring on health grounds

I have been very lucky not to have suffered some of the extreme health problems that so many people experience, and cannot complain about the general state of my health. Although always having had some immune issues (rhinitis, asthma,and it was suggested in my thirties that I might be experiencing an early onset of some auto-immune symptoms usually associate with more elderly people), I have so fr avoided major health scares.So, I have been more fortunate than many.

However, in recent years I have suffered frequent and increasingly severe bouts of fatigue that eventually reached the point where so much of my energy was needed to cope with the job that it left little for anything else.  Although I still very much enjoyed teaching it usually left me drained (and often with a sore throat by the time I left faculty). Whereas I had previously valued days when I did not need to be in Faculty as opportunities to work at home and focus on research, such days had increasingly become seen as essential rest breaks between teaching days – not days when I could not work at all, but certainly days where I could not work with the intensity or commitment of my younger days.

Time for reflection

I only really started thinking about retirement after the death of my wife. Understandably, I found I had little concentration, and limited drive to work, in the early months. However, I also became aware that my memory (which had never been a strong point – at least it was never the kind of detailed memory that some people have) seemed to be getting very bad. I was increasingly 'absent-minded' – but not just the occasional lapses that I had always had (and which many other people tell me they experience). This has not got better.

Whilst I do have my enthusiasm back to work on things that interest me, I now seem to more often lose concentration or get distracted,  and I definitely tire much more quickly than I used to. This does not seem to be due to bereavement as it does not seem to be improving over time. Although my GP checked my memory and did not identify a problem in clinical terms, my own subjective experience is rather different. I have always had strategies (routines, habits) to help overcome forgetfulness but now find these insufficient. This website grew initially out of a need to share teaching materials and disseminate research and scholarship. I am also increasingly seeing it as also a project to support my memory – if no one else reads the material on the site, it will still be a valuable aide-memoir for me!

Bereavement did (and does) however affect me in other ways. None of us know how long we have left, and my wife deserved many more years than she had (and indeed many more years before her health had seriously deteriorated). I do have regular periods of sadness and reflection  – which had to be pushed aside when I was at work – and there are myriad possible triggers. Retirement allows me to take time to be sad and reflect when I feel the need. This seems natural and healthy. Reflection also reminds one that too many people are too busy doing what they need to, just to live, and do not have the luxury of contemplating the nature of that life, or of what a good life should be. I have that luxury.

Prioritising

More selfishly perhaps, I can focus the time and energy I do have for work on the projects I most want to take forward, and do not have to feel under an obligation to take on work that interests me less or seems likely to put me under the kind of pressures I want to avoid.

It helped that the largest part of my teaching – on the Faculty's Educational Research course – came to an end in 2019-2020, so retiring did not leave a big gap in the staffing of the teaching programme (and staying on in office would have meant I would have been expected to have taken on a lot of new lectures to maintain a full workload). I became aware of that change during the 2018-2019 academic year when the recommendation to close Educational Research came to Faculty Board (as I happened to be on the Board at that time), which helped me to make the decision to give notification in September 2019, that I would retire a year later.

Of course, I could not have known then that the 2020-2021, academic year would have required a shift to on-line teaching because of the global pandemic making lectures too risky. This has put additional pressures on so many teachers/lecturers to make sudden changes in their work practices . So, in that sense, my timing was fortuitous.

Being more selective

So, I am retired. And so I feel more empowered to decline requests to take on work that I am not enthused about (especially work that is unpaid as so much academic work is, or which is rated at below minimal wage levels*).

I hope I still have some good work in me. I want to still make a modest contribution to scholarship.

I also hope, if perhaps less realistically, that if I reduce my workload, get as much sleep as my body indicates sensible (which has always been a lot more than some colleagues seem to need), continue to eat a healthy diet, take regular modest exercise, and make sure I rest whenever I feel tired (rather than feeling I need to push on because of the frequent deadlines that come with lecture courses), I may find that, in time, I get on top of whatever has been causing the fatigue over recent years. Perhaps my levels of concentration/attention and memory may also improve. That's optimistic, but one never knows.

Retirement is (also) a privilege

If not, I will at least know that I am very lucky to be able to retire as (I think) I can now afford not to work, and I have a comfortable home in a nice place (small woods and lakes within walking distance). Many, many people are not so lucky. I have many books to read and much music to listen to, and that seems a decent basis for retirement. (And perhaps during COVID is no less than many are having to settle for.) So, I've tried to look very positively on this.

Retirement is not the choice I would have made had I felt I could continue to do the job at the level I expected, and should be expected of me; and if I had not found that I would go home feeling shattered after nearly every class. But perhaps I am lucky to have the chance to have a new career as an independent scholar free to follow whatever themes and topics take my interest, when and only when so inclined, and without any pressures to feel I am expected to produce regular 'outputs'.

So, please understand if I decline your invitation to undertake some extra unpaid (or even paid) work that will lead to deadlines and commitments that I can – and perhaps need to – live without.

* This is surely the case for most external examining: taking PhD examining seriously probably means a week's work (carefully interrogating and evaluating the thesis, writing a detailed provisional report, meeting with the other examiner(s) and carrying out the viva voce exam, completing a final report), for which one might get offered as little as £150, so, something like £4 an hour.