Retirement

On the eve of her retirement a teacher examines all the educational statistics of her students from over the past forty one years. She looks at what level of knowledge they arrived with, how they progressed and what they finally achieved. At two in the morning, she realises that every student who failed she could not have helped and every student who succeeded would have done so irrespective of her efforts. She has been a ghost all her working life. She dies the day after her retirement and is lauded in that week's staff meeting. Then forgotten.