I’m sure it was someone famous--maybe E.B. White--who said that New York was the loneliest place on earth because you can be surrounding by people and feel entirely isolated. That’s what I’ve been feeling for the last few weeks--surrounded by people, children and adults--and totally alone.
Part of that loneliness has to do with the program itself. The student teacher lives in two worlds: the world of the program and the world of our placement schools. Part-time residents of both, we are fully at home in neither. In the program we have so many papers to write and so much to read and think about and consider that we hardly have time to breathe--much less to talk about what we’re doing or thinking about. In my placement school, I am surrounded by adults who, on the whole, don’t think that much about what their kids are experiencing or doing. And, besides, there’s little time to talk to a student teacher--particularly one with years of experience--about their hopes and goals for their unit or their kids.
A big part of this is just me: I learned to teach by working with other teachers. I have been so extremely lucky in the course of my career to have had other interesting people to write curriculum with, to laugh about my failures with, to talk through any goofy ideas I had, to read aloud interesting or hilarious student responses. I have no such people in my life right now--the best I can do is make long distance phone calls, catch my old colleagues in the evening. But it’s different talking to someone about what they are working on and actually working side by side with another.
I never felt lonely when I taught back east. But out here in the damp northwest, I feel it. Surrounded by the burnt out or the burning, by children who like me but who know that I’m a short-timer, I feel it.
America, this is no way to grow teachers. There must be a more connected way, a more humane way. Because all of this isolation isn’t good for me--and it can’t be good for the kids I’m supposed to serve.
