David Flannery

Smith College professor and friend of the College Mary Murphy wrote about one of our star visiting professionals, David Flannery.

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After a career in education spanning nearly half a century, visiting professional David Flannery has reached that stage of life in which many of his peers spend their days playing golf, relaxing with family, or schmoozing with other retired friends. He’s earned the right to kick back and take it easy. David, however, has already “retired” three times, and has chosen, in his words, not “to stop working, but to work differently.” This semester at the College, he is donating his time as an instructor of English.

David serves as the primary instructor for nine English students in the Agronomy and Education departments, and he collaborates with Bolivian instructors to provide additional hours of English for three levels of English in the Tourism department.

David brings to his volunteer semester at the College an impressive body of knowledge and experience. This first career spanned 40 years in public education, interrupted only by a stint at the University of Wisconsin to earn his doctorate in educational administration. He held a variety of positions, starting as a teacher of secondary English and Social Studies, then a high-school principal in the Minneapolis area, a director of secondary education for a rural school district in Oregon, and back to Minnesota where he served as superintendent of the Elk River School District for 14 years.

After his initial retirement, he worked as a consultant for the Perpich Center for Arts Education in Minneapolis, eventually becoming interim executive director for the Center – for three and a half years! David loved the job and hated to leave, but knew that the Center needed someone with vision who could commit to serving as director for a decade, so he decided in 2005 to retire for the second time.

This led to a third career, one in international education with the Nacel Schools. The Nacel organization benefited from David’s expertise in educational administration as it established American schools in the East Asia. David helped to get three schools started, two in Korea and one in China. He made some 10 trips to Asia in three years, once living for six months in Beijing, where he hired staff, established curriculum, and served both as school principal and as an English teacher. Tired, eventually, of all the traveling, he retired from Nacel in the summer of 2009. But not, of course, to stop working.

David is clear about his motives in volunteering at the College. Laughing, he says that he wanted to escape winter in Minnesota. More seriously, he explains that he retired to have the time and freedom to work at an institution whose mission he believes in and to engage in the sort of work that that he loves, especially teaching. He came to Bolivia aiming, also, to improve his Spanish, and he meets regularly with two Education students for Spanish conversation. Expressing frustration in his inability to express his ideas as an adult, he expects to continue studying Spanish after he returns home in June.

In spite of his rich and varied career in public and international education, David admits that his experience teaching at the College has been much more difficult than he would have imagined. Learning Spanish while trying to teach students who didn’t yet know any English is a tough assignment. When asked about any disappointments, he mentions only one: classes that fall apart despite his careful preparations.

Overall, David’s volunteer semester has been a positive experience. He likes being part of the volunteer community, a multi-age group with whom he shares meals, chores, and conversation. He appreciates living among students and other teachers at the College. He values all that he has learned of language, food, Bolivian culture, rural culture, and Aymara culture. He rejoices in breakthroughs he has made as he mastered a new area of teaching.

But he misses his family: wife Mary Grace, three adult children and seven grandchildren, all living in the Minneapolis area and all supportive of his volunteer semester in Carmen Pampa. He talks with Mary Grace via Internet three times a week, and she came here for a visit in March, but he misses home and is eager to be part of the daily lives of his children and grandchildren again.

And so, David Flannery is about to retire for the fourth time. We here in Carmen Pampa will miss him greatly, while we speculate about his next career.