Not elder law: Nation’s oldest full time teacher is 88

n front of a classroom of chatty 12th-graders, Rose Gilbert is passionately demonstrating how not to fade and wither with age.  Sportinga red plastic firefighter’s helmet, she tells her 30 students that “I’mon fire,” and she wants them to be on fire, too. She sticks a gold staron the forehead of one good-natured young man who has said somethingclever. As she dashes about the room — looking like a kindergartenteacher in a blouse printed with bookshelves, a sweater vest adornedwith crayons and globes, and sensible Mary Jane shoes — she exhorts her”bubbies” to elaborate on the themes of the Irish writer James Joyce’snovella “The Dead”: spiritual paralysis, people’s inability to livefully, the necessity of love.  “In Ireland,” she tells them dreamily, “they call rain ‘a softness.’ ”  They believe her. Why wouldn’t they?   RoseGilbert is 88. With the retirement last year of a 93-year-old healthteacher in Sylmar, Gilbert became the oldest full-time teacher in LosAngeles Unified School District, apparently the oldest in Californiaand one of the oldest in the nation. She has taught for more than 50years — first at University High School in West Los Angeles and then atPalisades Charter High School in Pacific Palisades, from its openingday in 1961.

Source:  Los Angeles Times, http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-teacher13may13,1,4203541.story?ctrack=2&cset=true