Star-Journbal Editor
Eileen Butler is wearing her after-school play clothes all the time now that she's on permanent vacation.
With more than 7,000 days at school and 800 students in her classrooms, she figured it was time to retire after 38 banner years as a teacher at Hillsboro Elementary School.
"Right now I do what I want to do," said Butler, who wore an eye-popping tie-dyed T-shirt for her interview.
"Two people gave me cards that say, 'retirement has its ups and downs. You can get up in the morning when you want to and go lie down when you want to.' And that fits me pretty well."
Butler, 60, was honored last month at a school board meeting. With an Outstanding Service Award in hand, it would be easy for her to slow down.
But she's just getting started.
In fact, after literally "throwing in the towel" as a teacher, Butler's travel itinerary is booked for the rest of summer and into the fall.
How fitting that she was scheduled to embark on the vacation of her dreams, to Australia, on Independence Day.
She's been buying suitcases and clothes and working on her Strine — Australian words, phrases, and colloquialisms.
"We've been told there are certain words you shouldn't say because it doesn't mean the same thing here, or vice versa."
Butler looks forward to visiting some longtime friends who moved Down Under a few years ago, Heather (Dies) Lingerich and her husband, Matt. Heather was born in Hillsboro.
Butler's traveling companion will be Heather's mother Sharon Dies, of Lehigh.
Watching kangaroos and hugging koala bears are on the must-do list for Butler, who'll probably see the trip through the eyes of a third grade teacher, eager to take the sights, sounds, and lessons back for Show and Tell.
A more personal Show and Tell time came two years ago, after she was diagnosed with cancer and went through chemo.
"You don't know what impression you make on people," she said. "That class, of course, they wanted to know if I'd lost hair, and I said, 'Well, not yet.'
"Well then I had 'Well, can we see?' I said, 'When I've accepted it, when I'm OK with it, I'll show it to you.' And so one day I said, 'OK, come and sit up here.'
'You gonna show us?'
"I said, 'yes'."
'Well, what if somebody laughs?'
"I said, 'Well, if somebody laughs, they laugh. I can't help that. But I'd be disappointed.'
"They're real sympathetic at that age,' she added. "So, anyway, then I took off my hat and took off my wig and not one person said a thing, not one person laughed.
"I think they knew that I was the same person, whether I had my hair or whether I didn't have any hair.
"And when it started growing back, it was like baby fuzz," Butler said. "And, I'd be sitting down and pretty soon I'd feel someone petting my head and I'd turn around and there'd be some kid who just had to touch that, you know?
"They probably had the best education that year with that because they had to live through it, through me, I guess you might say."
One way she'll remember all the banner years is with the banners she's made of blocks of cloth personalized by each child in each class.
"First I read an article that suggested that you have your students make little squares and then you make it into a skirt and use it, so I did," she said.
"Well, after about three skirts, I was being poked by my former students saying, 'There's mine! There's mine!'
"So I decided three skirts were enough."
From the time Butler started teaching in the Hillsboro school system in 1968, as a young woman from central Iowa by way of McPherson College, Butler has watched children grow wiser and more knowledgeable.
"Today's third graders are learning what fifth and sixth graders were learning before," Butler said. "And the things taught to third graders, a lot of it is down in first grade today.
"Kids don't come to school not knowing anything anymore," she added. "They need to know their colors, their numbers, you know, all those kinds of things. Not all of them do, but that's the idea."
Two years after coming back from cancer, Butler said it was time for the children to learn some important lessons that she wasn't prepared to teach them.
"I know how to turn it on and get my emails and do the little things, but they were asking us to do more things on the computer in the classroom, and I just couldn't catch on to it," Butler said. "I felt the kids were losing out, me not being able to do that.
"I like to travel, and with the cancer, well, it was time. I knew a long time before I told anyone outside my immediate family."
She "threw in the towel," on May 3, her father's birthday, so she'd never forget.
"I had my resignation letter and I wrapped it up in a towel with apples printed on it and I took it to the principal (Evan Yoder) and said I was throwing in the towel," she said with a laugh.
"But it was bittersweet," she added. "I'll miss the kids, and I'll miss the teacher friends I had."
