The high school teacher pointed to four of his students and told them sternly that they would have detention that afternoon. They would be required to stay after school because they had been acting up in his classroom.

In response, the ringleader of the group announced “I’m not staying here,” and promptly stomped out, followed by the other three boys. Of that event, which occurred in December of his first year as a teacher, Richard Kindleberger says: “I had a mini-mutiny on my hands.”

Kindleberger later worked out this particular problem but, as this anecdote suggests, the first months of teaching can be fairly rough. In this instance the teacher was almost 60 with a long and rewarding career elsewhere.

On balance, however, he is glad he took on this new role in the world of work. “I feel gratified and satisfied with my experience,” he says, “even though it has been hard.”

Before becoming a teacher, Kindleberger spent more than 30 years as a newspaperman. He wrote for the Worcester Telegram and Gazette before moving to the Boston Globe in 1972. At this paper he covered a wide variety of areas, including the environment, the State House, and the “Spotlight Team,” the Globe’s investigative arm.

In his later years there, he transferred to business and wrote first about security and mutual funds, then about real estate, both retail and commercial. Some of the work he found exciting, as when he went up against the Boston School Committee and later when he took on the notoriously ornery John Silber, then president of Boston University. He recalls having been thrown out of the latter’s office when Silber objected to his line of questioning.

“A good way to spend one’s active work life,” says Kindleberger about his years as a journalist. It satisfied him to write about such a variety of topics for a newspaper that had achieved dominance in New England. But when the company offered a buyout for employees near the normal retirement age, he decided to take the deal.

“I wanted to do something else,” he says of his decision. Not for him was the formerly conventional view of retirement. He did not want to put his feet up and simply take it easy. Instead, he desired a challenge that would come from taking on a different kind of work.

A trip he and his wife made to Costa Rica stirred in him the desire to learn Spanish. “That trip gave me the bug,” he says, recalling how he first became enthusiastic about the language. This interest turned out to be no mere passing phase. Instead, he plunged into Spanish studies, first hiring a tutor, then taking an immersion course in Mexico, spending a summer in Madrid, and finally getting a master’s degree in the subject.

The decision to become a teacher came readily, in part because his father and his sisters had followed that same path before him. In what he thinks of as a “way of getting my feet wet,” Kindleberger started teaching a course for some of his neighbors. Then he passed the state exam for teacher certification and was offered a part-time job by a North Shore town, starting in the fall of 2004.

From the beginning, this former newsman has found himself warmly accepted by fellow teachers and the school’s administration. “I felt very much made welcome,” he says of their response. “They were willing to take a chance on non-traditional careers.”

The response of the students, however, appeared to be mixed. “The kids seem to have a different way of relating to teachers,” he explains. They are less impressed with their teachers as authority figures than he recalls from his own school days.

The adolescents also remain less focused on their studies; teachers must compete with television and video games. Some students also are distracted by problems they encounter at home. Looking on their Spanish teacher as a man of a certain age, they often tease him as being “out of it.”

As a result, “the learning curve has been steep for me,” Kindleberger freely admits. Classroom management has proven to be more of a challenge than he expected. However, he credits the wealth of experience he has of himself and the world of work with enabling him to withstand some of the rough parts of the job.

Would he advise others to make the same kind of transition to teaching? “I would not discourage anyone from trying it,” he says, “but they should not expect it to be always fun.” He has no regrets personally, but he cannot deny it has been hard.

In fact, he plans to take next year off and then will investigate alternative teaching positions. His hope ─ shared by teachers of all ages ─ is to find students who are eager to respond to his enthusiasm and love for his subject.

Richard Griffin