I am fortunate to have a job and I am very fortunate to have a job that I actually like going to, well on most days. Having this job does allow me to plan for my retirement. And for this I am thankful.
Although most of my working career was spent in the corporate IT world, I am now in academia. I have a staff position at a college as an LMS (Learning Management System) Administrator. Basically I’m the administrator on their online course system. However, when I first came to the college, I was hired into a tenure-track teaching position – Instructor of Business Information Systems. I did this for four years. I taught part time throughout my career and thought teaching full time would be my dream job. Well, it didn’t really work out that way (what actually ever works out the way we think it will?). The teaching part of the job was great – absolutely loved it! Dealing with student’s excuses was a different story – every semester, every class, came with student excuses… A friend of mine recently shared the following youtube ‘I’m worried about my grade’ video that really shows this, take a look:
I still teach as an adjunct from time to time and am planning to continue that after retiring from full time work. I think adjunct teaching, especially online courses, will fit nicely into a retirement schedule. I doubt the student excuses will stop but maybe only teaching a few courses per year will help me tolerate it better : )