When most people dream of retirement, they think of days filled with golfing and resting. For four former Grady teachers, however, time away from Grady has been anything but typical.

Scott Stephens

After 15 years of teaching at Grady and 11 years in the Fulton County School System, Stephens was ready for something different and more relaxed. When ninth and tenth-grade literature teacher Nalin Needham began as a student teacher in his class, Stephens knew he would be leaving his position in good hands.

“When I turned 60, I started thinking about [retiring],” Stephens said, “but when [Needham] showed up and indicated he was interested in teaching here, that was an easy decision at that point.”

In his 1995-1996 break between Fulton County and Grady, Stephens lived in Egypt with his wife. During his year there, Stephens developed a love for the Arabic language. Now he’s been able to indulge that interest by taking language classes at Georgia State University.

“The first semester after I retired, I took an Arabic class,” Stephens said. “I took three classes in Arabic and I took an Arabic literature class, but this fall I tried to switch to French literature. …I learned French in a French-speaking country, but I never took French literature or writing classes, so this is all new stuff. ”

Despite the year he spent in Egypt, the classes Stephens took were much harder than he expected.

“There’s a reason that young people go to school,” Stephens said. “It’s so much easier for young people to learn, and they’re so much quicker, and I felt like the dunce in the corner, sometimes, because it just takes me a lot longer, and of course I don’t have that same motivation. I’m not taking anything for credit, I’m not trying to get a degree, so, you know, if something comes up, and I don’t do my homework I’m just ‘oh, too bad, no big deal.’”

In addition to learning more about languages, Stephens has also returned to fulfilling a passion he has neglected since college: working on political campaigns. He’s spent time doing voter registration, phone banking, and a bit of door-to-door canvassing.

“I went down to south Florida to work on the Obama campaign,” Stephens said. ‘This fall I’ve been working on the Carter/Nunn campaigns. It’s a lot easier to do that when you’re not working.”

Deedee Abbott

After seven years of teaching English at Grady, Deedee Abbott was ready to go back to being a full time mom to her two children, Flora and Finn, who are in seventh and third grade, respectively.

“I was just not successful coordinating my school life with the school lives of my children,” Abbott said.  “A lot of stuff fell through the cracks.”

Abbott has enjoyed the opportunities she’s had to spend with her children.

“I’ve been able to do things like I got to do the book parade [at the Atlanta Neighborhood Charter School],” Abbott said, “and I was never able to do Flora’s book parade because I was working. It’s not enough consistent things to fill up every day, but when they are going to say the pledge of allegiance at Morning Meeting I want to be there, or if they’re sick I want to be able to pick them up. I just don’t want to sideline them.”

In addition to devoting more time to her children, Abbott has also been able to complete more household-related jobs like cleaning, cooking and doing laundry.

“I also go to the farmer’s market once a week with a group of stay-at-home parents, and we talk about recipes and plan our healthy meals,” Abbott said. “This year I do notice that have a little too much time on my hands, and I’m going to fill it with some creative, peaceful, passion that is yet to be determined.”

Although she does not currently plan on returning to teaching once her children get older, she is thinking about returning to education.

“I would like to be a student again more than I would like to be a teacher,” Abbott said. “I’d like to just get really involved into a single author or maybe even a single work and just study it.”

Next semester, Abbott plans to audit a class on Eudora Welty at Georgia State University. The class is taught by Pearl McHaney, a Welty scholar who taught Abbott while Abbott worked to receive her masters in English.

Brian Leahy

After a myriad of job experiences and five years teaching special education at Grady, Leahy was ready for something different. In the four months since his departure, he has completed a number of different trips and has planned to take more. Most recently, Leahy and his wife traveled to London and Dublin.

Leahy has also made a number of excursions to Buffalo, N.Y. to visit family.

At Grady, Leahy worked as the mock trial team’s teacher coach. Despite the fact that he no longer works directly with the team, he plans to remain active in the high school mock trial community.

Leahy has spent time reconnecting with friends, reorganizing his house, quitting smoking and helping a friend who works with handicapped artists in Atlanta.

Leahy’s long term goals do not include returning to teaching, or any 9-5 job for that matter, but do include driving to South America with a friend.

“[We plan on driving] down through Central America and getting a boat across,” Leahy said. “[My friend] is an urban farmer, so we’re gonna try to do some talks at some resorts about sustainable farming.”

Jeff Cramer

With almost 17 years of teaching at Grady under his belt, Jeff Cramer was ready to finally leave Grady in May of 2014.

“I was never going to get to the point where I could say, ‘Well this is the last group that I want to teach,’” Cramer said. “The parents were never going to say to me, ‘Well, you’ve done everything for our community that we want you to do now you can leave.’ They were always going to say, ‘You’ve got to wait for my fifth grader, you’ve got to wait for my second grader,’ and the only way to get out of that loop is just draw a line. So I asked Dr. Murray if it was ok for me to just announce a year ahead of time that it was going to be my last year.”

In the three months that have passed since his retirement, Cramer has not completely distanced himself from Grady.

“I’d worked 16 years to build up the cross-country program,” Cramer said, “and we’d been very successful in the last 16 years, and I didn’t want that to fall apart, and I felt that keeping the cross-country team fairly easily and that emotionally I was prepared to do that.”

Cramer is currently scouting for a new cross country coach and would like to find one within year or two.

When’s he not at cross-country practice every afternoon and Saturday morning, Cramer has been filling his days with more time-consuming interests that he didn’t have the time for while teaching: attending old-people yoga classes, playing the violin, interpreting dreams, swimming every morning and volunteering at his church.

Although his days are fairly filled with activities, Cramer still feels open to even more novel experiences.

“One of my philosophies of life is that you don’t go out and try to find a group and push yourself into the group,” Cramer said. “You get involved in the idea, immerse yourself in it, and then opportunities present themselves…and I want to be open to doing whatever presents itself.”