The old floorboards are painted a dark chocolate brown; the wall air conditioner seems overwhelmed by the fierce midday heat.

But the room is spotless and here, amid the neat groupings of 32 freshly scrubbed metal desks and orange plastic chairs, Randy Moore is beginning the second year of his new career as a Hawai'i public-school teacher.

"I think I'm the oldest teacher on the campus," said Moore, 63, who turned to teaching after retiring in May 2001 as president and chief executive officer of Kane'ohe Ranch.

"I had some kids who would say, 'How old are you?' and I would say, 'How old do you think I am?' And they would say, 'Eighty.' They just knew I was this old geezer who had come onto their campus."

Moore came to that campus with a specific goal in mind: to help middle-schoolers retain the zest for learning they had in their early years, so they can do well in high school.

"Most children get through elementary school happy," said Moore, who this year will be teaching math to English as a Second Language students in grades six to eight.

"School is fun and they like to go. But too many get derailed in middle school, and if they don't get through middle school liking school they're not going to like high school. And if you don't do well in high school, you're really limiting your opportunities as an adult. So the main objective of middle school is to keep students engaged in learning so they want to keep learning, rather than thinking school is a drag or a chore."

Moore's previous professional life was spent among adults, including executive positions with Castle & Cooke and Moloka'i Ranch before Kane'ohe Ranch. But his work with young people includes helping Liberian village kids during a stint with the Peace Corps in the 1960s, raising two daughters with his wife, Lynne Johnson, and volunteering for 15 years with Big Brothers Big Sisters.

With these experiences in mind, Moore said, when he reached the ranch's standard retirement age of 62, "It seemed like a good opportunity to do something different."

Moore did not enter the classroom completely untrained: Before leaving his CEO position, he took night classes at Chaminade University to get his teaching certificate. He also had his years of business experience, which some predicted would serve him well.

He found the opposite to be true.

"There's really almost nothing that carries forward," Moore said. "If you look at experienced teachers, they really know what they're doing, and I'm still groping and will be for a while. You have to be very organized and think not what you as a teacher will be doing, but what will the students be doing? How is what they are doing useful to them as learners?"

Moore began his new career at an age when many teachers are writing their last lesson plans. But he has no intentions of being a short-timer, saying he hopes to teach for 10 years, until he's 72. A wiry, energetic man, Moore says a take-it-easy retirement holds no appeal for him.

"How old is Senator Inouye? How old is Senator Akaka? How old is Patsy Mink?" he said. "The sort of traditional retirement — I think more and more people are not doing it. Somebody said of my generation that we're all going to live to be 90 or 100 anyway, so if you throw in the towel at 60 you've got a long period of time of being not terribly productive."

And for those retirement-age executives contemplating a move to something completely different, he offers this advice: "Just do it."

Moore went into teaching to help young people, but he freely admits he can't point to any big successes yet. And that's to be expected, he says.

"The teachers that really made a difference in my life — I'm not sure that I knew it right away," he said. "What you get out of a teacher is really not the specific subject matter, but you get insights on the subject matter sometimes and more often it's insights on life and living in yourself. That's really what a good teacher gives you. I don't think as a student you realize that immediately. That insight comes over time."

Still, he takes the small victories as they come. One day, he said, he was in the Honolulu International Airport waiting for a flight to Kaua'i when a security guard approached him.