Teaching Can Be a Lonely Job

One day last week I was talking to Lisa Cochran, who co-teaches freshman English with me, when one of our new teachers ran into the English office. 'I've got a girl in my class who's crying,' she said. 'She won't tell me what it's about. She doesn't want to go to the nurse. She wants to go to lunch with her friend. What should I do?'

'Who's the girl?' I asked. She told me. 'Let her go,' I said. 'She's a good kid.'

'And you don't want her in your classroom if she's crying,' Lisa added.

'That's what I thought, too,' the new teacher said, and ran back out.

It made me think about my first year, when I often wished I could run to the English office and ask for advice. But I was in a different part of the building, with teachers from other departments on either side of me. I was too proud and too shy to seek their help.
That's how teaching is, most of the time. You're isolated, the only adult in a room full of students. There's a telephone, but it feels silly to use it for anything less than a dire emergency. And you know what to do in a dire emergency -- it's the smaller emergencies that are tough, especially if you're just starting out.

After the new teacher left, Lisa and I talked about what a relief it is to work in the same room with another teacher. There's a lot more flexibility -- one teacher can be working with a group while the other holds individual conferences. If one of us gets sick, the other knows what to do. We can consult with each other on individual students: Why isn't anything working with so-and-so? How about whatshername's last essay? Wasn't that great?
It's especially good if you have different styles of teaching, as Lisa and I do. She's very thorough and detail-oriented; I call her the Process Queen. That helps me stay organized. Contrarily, when plans break down and we're forced to improvise, I'm in my comfort zone.
It helps the students, as well. They get the benefit of two sets of eyes, two sensibilities, two lives' worth of experience. Some of them complain that we have different grading standards. 'That's right,' we reply. 'Do you expect us to be clones? You'll have different standards to meet in every one of your classes, not to mention in every job you'll ever hold. Get used to it.'

True, not everyone can work so closely with another person. Sometimes you have to give ground, and sometimes you have to bring conflict out in the open. But I don't think personality clashes explain why there's so little collaborative teaching going on, at least at the high school level. The real problems are the twin monsters: architecture and scheduling.
Lisa and I are lucky this semester. We have adjoining classrooms with a movable wall in between. We can open the wall to have single large room for activities involving all 37 of our freshmen. There are very few rooms like that at ConVal. We also share a prep block, which makes joint planning much easier. It took a lot of lobbying with the guidance department, which controls rooms and schedules, to get those things.

Next semester, when we'll team-teach honors freshman English, we'll have the same rooms but not the same prep block. It was impossible to schedule. We'll get by, but it will be much harder.

Teaching can be a lonely job. If a kid starts crying uncontrollably, it's nice to have someone there to carry on with the lesson while you see what you can do for the kid. And if it's the teacher who suddenly feels like crying uncontrollably, it's nice to have a friend around, too.