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The Express

The Student News Site of Sacramento City College

The Express

The Student News Site of Sacramento City College

The Express

Part time teaching is the new retirement

Gene Sellers, though officially retired, continues to teach classes at City College—including this statistics class.  || Sophia Lopez | lopezs8@imail.losrios.edu
Gene Sellers, though officially retired, continues to teach classes at City College—including this statistics class. || Sophia Lopez | [email protected]

Retirement.

Some people look forward to it even before they start their careers—relax all day, indulge in hobbies, enjoy the grandchildren and do all the things an active career deprives us of.

Some City College professors have a very different view of retirement. In fact, a number of instructors on campus, who have retired from full-time teaching positions, continue to teach part time.

Mathematics professor Gene Sellers is one of these professors who continue to teach long after most have retired. Though Sellers is reluctant to reveal his age, he’s been teaching at City College since 1969.

“Students will ask me how old I am, and I don’t tell them,” Sellers says. “One class a couple years ago—it was in summer school—they kept bugging me: ‘How old are you? How old are you?’ So I told them, and the class was so quiet. You could have heard a pin drop; it was like, ‘Oh my God, how can somebody that old still be walking around?’ So I don’t tell them how old I am.”

But that doesn’t keep students from flocking to his classes.

“He’s really funny, makes math much more bearable,” says Andrea Griffey, a City College student currently in Seller’s statistics class. “[He] makes it more realistic, and like, it relates, he makes it relate to life.”

Sellers officially retired in 1997, taught for two more years, then stopped teaching for approximately a year. He began teaching again when another teacher who needed to have surgery asked him to finish up her classes that semester. Ever since, he’s continued to teach and influence the lives of City College students.

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“I like to design and deliver psychology classes using new technologies” says Dowdall. “This has been my main career passion.”

Dowdall has taught for 43 years, and has been retired for seven.

Some may wonder how a professor can be retired and yet still teach?

John Ruden, the interim vice president of Instruction, explains that retirees receive their retirement benefits, and the income they earn, while they teach, is added to that. So it’s just like having an extra part-time job. Ruden himself had recently retired from his position as dean at the City College Davis Outreach Center, but has returned as the vice president of instruction until a permanent replacement can be found.

City College student Dacy Manuita believes having teachers like Sellers and Dowdall could be helpful.

“The professors have more experience; they’ve been teaching longer than others,” she says.

So why do these professors keep teaching?

“Primarily, I enjoy getting together with young people,” says Sellers. “I have fun with my classes. You know, I tease them, they tease me, and I want them to be happy, and to respect me.”

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