Professor Tilley, [sic! :-]

congratulations and please enjoy your retirement! Good luck with your projects and have a nice day

Paweł

First of all, let me offer my congratulations. I think teachers deserve a special round of applause for trying to improve the general human condition.

Well done, Sir!

As for moving the post, I guess I've kind of glued it down here, but if the mods are slow to do so, just post it over there, come back and rewrite this one, and I'll follow along.

Good job, John!

Stripper, eh?

Congratulations on a successful career and enjoy many years of retirement.

My countdown has begun,18 months left for me !!!!

Congratulations on your retirement ! where  every day is Saturday .

Prof,

Congratulations on your new status.

And as a keeper, not every teacher can say that they have driven a student to make that particular career choice.

Best of luck going forward.

Rick

JTilley -

I spent 40 years and two months total at my career, 33 at the last employer. Loved it, but all things move on. Each day now is filled with just about whatever I want, or need to do, I determine the schedule. Nice.

One thing wrong with retirement though, you never get a day off. 

Hearty congratulations, a career well invested, teaching the future generations. Well done, enjoy.

Patrick 

When I read about your change in life a Bible verse comes to mind: To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.

May this next phase in life bring you much joy, John. Congratulations!

patrick206

One thing wrong with retirement though, you never get a day off. 

I wish I had your problem. 

Congrats Tilly. Well deserved.

Anthony, awesome for you too. Imagine how many WIP's you will crank out for us.

Congrats on your retirement! 33 years is a long time but now you deserve the rest. Enjoy the free time you have with family and friends and travel as much as you can. Okay - let's not forget hitting the bench too!

Dr. Tilley,

You haven't finished teaching.  You still have an entire class of blockheads here! 

Wish you well on your new assignment!

Gary

Please allow me to add my congratulations Dr. Tilley!  You had a great career, and I hope retirement is as sweet.  I retired Friday from a 17 year junior high teaching career (late starter at 45).  A colleague suggested that much like "dog years', junior high teaching years should count double toward retirement!  Good luck!

Gary

Texgunner

Please allow me to add my congratulations Dr. Tilley!  You had a great career, and I hope retirement is as sweet.  I retired Friday from a 17 year junior high teaching career (late starter at 45).  A colleague suggested that much like "dog years', junior high teaching years should count double toward retirement!  Good luck!

Gary

 

Congrats also Tex,that's great

 congrates on your retirement.  I pulled the pin last august.Youth is waisted on the young

Congratulations on your retirement Prof. Tilley. I pulled the plug 18 years ago from the company where I thoroughly enjoyed working for a total of 36 years. I know that my success there was due to the hard work of my teachers who not only had to beat the knowledge into my feeble brain but install the drive needed to attain that success. 

Enjoy your retirement.  Well earned.

Jim  

congratulations on your retiement , I still have 6 years to go , teaching is a noble profession , have a great retirement

steve5

Congratulations Professor. You soon will be busier than when you were working.

Proffessor Tilley ;

   You truly don't realize what's ahead for you , do you ? Days and days of teaching  blockheads( To paraphrase someone here ) and zealots how to do it right .

 Enjoy the early times .You will find yourself busier than any time you had a class . Just no more semester notes or students failing to do their homework . Congratulations !

     By the way , You really are in for it now , you know !   Luck - Tanker-Builder

Tojo72

 

 

Texgunner

Please allow me to add my congratulations Dr. Tilley!  You had a great career, and I hope retirement is as sweet.  I retired Friday from a 17 year junior high teaching career (late starter at 45).  A colleague suggested that much like "dog years', junior high teaching years should count double toward retirement!  Good luck!

Gary

 

 

 

 

Congrats also Tex,that's great

 

Thanks Tojo, much appreciated I assure you! 

templar1099

Congratulations Professor. You soon will be busier than when you were working.

 

Ain't that the truth! I spent my entire life working in a variety of warehouse and driving jobs, never in one place long enough to have a real career. The last few were spent working at temp jobs, one of which was driving cars from local dealers to an auction house. There were several older guys there, all of whom were past retirement age. When I asked why they were doing that job they all gave the same reply - the boredom of retirement was killing them. I thought then that if I ever got to retire I still wouldn't have enough hours in the day to accomplish everything I wanted to.

It turned out I was right. Between playing music, doing historical research for a WW1 "100 Years Ago" thread on another website, and of course building models, I'm still getting further and further behind where I want to be.

Retirement? An excuse to play nonstop all day. Boredom? Never gonna happen.

Congratulations, Doc. As has been mentioned, teaching is an admirable carrer, good on you.

Incidentally, your senior spelled 'stripper' correctly, all is not lost.

Edit: Oh my, I misspelled "career". Sort of takes the punch out of my feeble attempt at humor.

I can't thank all you folks enough. The FSM Forum is one of the finest collections of people I've ever met. And the good news is that even if your health isn't what it used to be, and your skills have deteriorated a bit, as long as you've got a phone and some fingers, and the FSM Forum, you'll always have friends.

Jtilley and Tex congrads guys! I know some of your students learned something, it's hard not to remember the horrible ones though! 

Enjoy your retirement. I retired in 2013 after teaching political science for 40 years. I sympathize with you about your students. Hopefully, you failed the aspiring stripper. Too often students don't have to perform because they know the professors will pass them regardless of their grades. I'm surprised your course was not removed from the ROTC requirements if it was giving the students trouble--that is what is often done if certain courses are a roadblock to students continuing in a program because it often causes those students to choose other fields to avoid that class (especially math).

Enjoy your modeling!

Oh yeah, the aspiring stripper flunked all right - and dropped out.

ECU has two ROTC programs: Army and Air Force. The Air Force program puts modern American military history on a list of courses from which the cadets can pick (the others including foreign relations, Russian history, modern China, and several others). The Army requires that every cadet take at least one of the two American military history courses (pre-1900 and/or post-1900). For the past thirty three years, none of those Army cadets has gotten a commission unless I say he/she gets a commission. The COs of the Army program actually have been very supportive. A couple of them have put together required military history study sessions. And last semester I had a case in which an Army cadet was accused of cheating on an exam. I called the colonel, and the two of us gave the kid a grilling he'll never forget. (We both eventually concluded the kid was innocent.)

I do think the Athletic Department figured out that it wasn't a good idea to put weak students in my classes - after a handful of football, basketball, and track stars flunked because they made no effort to learn anything.  And the recent scandals at "our flagship institution" in Chapel Hill have made me vow never to watch another college athletic event. (On the other hand, a tennis player who majored in history was one of our Outstanding Seniors.)

None of which means that there isn't a problem with academic standards at that institution. The Powers that Be seem to have the notion that it needs to get bigger all the time, and the graduation rate has to be increased. At the moment, something like 25 percent get bachelors' degrees in four years. And the state legislature doesn't like that. But I have to say that in the time I was there none of my superiors ever said a word to me about reducing the number of Fs I gave, or raising the number of As. (I like to think they knew what would happen if they tried it.)

I raise a glass to anyone and everyone who makes it to retirement!

Not an easy place to get to!

I'll be surprised if I even make it to retirement age, let alone be able to afford it! I've set myself up to go into temporary retirement every year though! Bust my hump all summer, so I can retire to the deer woods and salmon streams in fall, and build models for the rest of winter...keeping a part time, "on call" job at the local airport for graveyard shift snow removal...just to get me out of the house from time to time!

Enjoy!

jtilley

About a month ago I finished up my last military history course at East Carolina University, and officially retired. (For the previous three years I'd been on "Phased Retirement," a nice arrangement that let me teach part-time, get half my former salary, and collect my pension simultaneously.) But now it's over. All that's left is to clean out my office (best accomplished with a hand grenade).

Thirty-three years is a long time, but it's still a little hard to believe the end is here. I imagine it all won't really sink in till the fall semester starts, in August. ("Summer vacation" has ceased to have meaning.) My colleagues in the History Department gave me a nice plaque, and I've been told that I'll get emeritus status as soon as the next academic year starts. (That means a free parking pass and full access to the library.) And I particularly value the letter of thanks I got from the Army lieutenant colonel - a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan - who commands the ECU ROTC detachment. My military history courses have been torturing the cadets for more than three decades now.

I've met lots of fine, interesting people (and some I really wish I hadn't met). I got sick to death of departmental meetings and committee work. But I never got completely burned out on teaching. (I did, however, start feeling like an old fossil - especially when I started getting freshmen who didn't know how to take notes on a lecture, or take an essay exam.)

Earlier today I went through a stack of exam booklets, to see if there were any I wanted to keep as souvenirs. One from last semester jumped out. The lady in question (a senior whose major, gawd help us, was history education) had already flunked all the other graded exercises in the course, and after a long talk with me had announced that she was going to "turn things around." She got a 37 (F) on the final exam; it was perfectly obvious that she hadn't taken notes, read the assignments, or made any other effort to prepare for it. She did, however, append the following note on the last page of her exam booklet:

"Dr. Tilly [sic],

"I apoligize [sic] for not making your head spin with a complete turn around in your class. I have no excuses other than I was not prepared for this semester.Thank you for trying to help me I am grateful for it however I have decided that maybe school is not for me and I should become a stripper. Thanks for everything!"

After re-reading that one, I concluded that yes - it was time to retire.

My father was a college professor too (architecture). I can't resist quoting the words one of our graduating students said at the awards ceremony:

Dad, I made it.

So, back to the workbench and my Gloucester fishing schooner.

 

P.S. I meant to post this in the FSM Ready Room, but I hit the wrong button. (Old men do that now and then.) I apologize; I've asked the moderators to move it.

Later edit: They did. Thank you, moderators.

 

Ok, i have two questions (someone has to ask and it might as well be the Brit)

Did she, and do you have pictures

Congratulations, and i must say, you have far more courage than me.

But now you have no excuses not to build more models.

fermis

Bust my hump all summer, so I can retire to the deer woods and salmon streams in fall, and build models for the rest of winter...