I was a tourist teacher

When I started teaching in 1960, I did not know that I would become a tourist teacher. I thought that you got a job and kept it till you retired. My first job was in Castleton-on-Hudson for the Schodack Central Schools teaching junior high science and high school mathematics. I could see that there was little room for advancement in this small school system, and so I worked on my master's degree in mathematics at Albany State in the summers and applied for some other jobs such as community college teacher in the Adirondack area, a (NSF) National Science Foundation Fellowship to study mathematics at Cornell University, and chairman of a mathematics department in a different school system. I ended up being selected for all three positions and had to make a choice, so I decided to attend Cornell University for a second master's degree in mathematics. After all, NSF paid for the whole thing, including living expenses. The Cornell experience was hard work but great fun, and I ended the year there with two masters degrees, one from Cornell and one from Albany State. So then what.

We decided that teaching in Hawaii would be different, and so I applied for jobs in that new state and was accepted to teach math and physics at the Iolani School (an Episcopal school for boys). After three years there, I thought more graduate work would be a good idea and was accepted to attend the University of Arizona in Tucson to do further graduate work. In the nine years living in Tucson, I finished my PhD and taught or did administrative work at the Green Fields School, Pima Community College, and six years at the University of Arizona.

A position opened at the University of New Mexico, and we moved and taught there for four years. Then I moved to San Diego State for one year, and then back to New Mexico to be an administrator of the Pine Hills School on the Navajo Indian Reservation. This one year stint was followed by a job in the Albuquerque Public Schools as an administrator. I finally decided that all this moving around, or tourist teaching, had to stop if I ever wanted to retire before I was 80 years old, so I stayed with the APS schools for the next 14 years.

I guess it is not so surprising that when we retired, we started to get itchy feet again and have found ourselves full-timers in our motor home and back on the road as tourists this time, if not teaching.