Daily Conversation – Prosper with it or decay without it

School talk. With whom do you talk to share your school doings and air your thoughts? You know – the things that raise your ire or get under your skin and nag on you until you can release their toxin by talking with someone. And, who is the first person with whom you share your successes each day? Irritation and enjoyment are the two faces of our professional work. Too often, the answer to each question is the same – no one.

Teachers are exceptionally vulnerable to the malady of isolated work. We work with children all day. We are in contact with their parents, counselors, principals and other teachers regarding these children so much that we don’t have many in-school minutes for personal conversations. Prep time is precious. After school meetings are pre-focused on standards and assessments and calendared school events. By the close of any school day, we are full of things to talk about and the pressures we face professionally make a frequent conversation a requirement for our personal and career health. We all need our place and time to talk and someone to listen.

Recent legislation has made our profession even more comparative and competitive and collegiality often does not include the sharing of confidences, at least the type of confidences required for soul-searching and elation. In the state’s public report card, what is your teacher effectiveness rating? Is it as solid as the ratings of other job-alikes in your school? Sadly, paranoia may raise its head whenever we share confidences with a colleague or with our supervisor. Are we complaining or bragging? By necessity then we need a true confidante who can hear our inner most thoughts without our fear of liability.

Every once and while the teaching gods shine on us. My wife is a teacher of special education children. She returned to teaching in the 80s when the last of our three children enrolled in school. In the mid-70s I changed from a classroom assignment to a schoolhouse assignment as a principal and in the 90s took an assignment as a superintendent. My wife and I talk about schooling every day. We talk about teaching. We talk about teaching that seems to work and why and teaching that seems to fail and why. We talk about children and their learning needs. She talks about hers and I talk about mine. We talk about the good, the bad and the ugly of our school days every day.

For the past 15 years we have held our daily talks in our hot tub. Nice! Interestingly, we installed the tub for just this purpose – our place to soak and talk. We enjoy the dual benefits of a hot soak that releases the physical tensions and a school talk that releases the professional tensions. We think that the place for our talks needs to be completely separable from a school house; the kind of place that cannot be found where we work. It doesn’t have to be a hot tub, but for us it is.

Why is daily conversation important? Because the history and tradition of classroom work isolates a teacher and in the 21st century we can no longer afford to be isolated.

When Ichabod Crane taught the children in a small hamlet in New Amsterdam, he was THE teacher. There were no other teachers within miles. Master Crane roomed with a local family taking his meals at their table and sleeping under their eaves. He walked or rode his horse alone to the schoolhouse and back each day. Master Crane did not speak of his day at school with anyone and few would have deigned to talk with him about his teaching. What did they know? THE teacher determined what was to be learned, how it was to be learned, and who did and did not learn what was taught. He lived a life of professional isolation.

Schooling did not change for more than 200 years albeit urban communities built large schoolhouses where many Master Cranes taught and lived in much the same fashion as Ichabod. Master Crane could have walked into any rural or small town school and been extremely comfortable with the professional life he found there. And, his professional life would have been very similar as a large school teacher who was singularly responsible for children in a classroom in a large building of many classrooms.

I well remember my grandmother’s small one-room schoolhouse near Fennimore, WI, where she taught in the 1940s, 50s and early 60s. A county superintendent visited her school site once each month, but on a daily basis she worked as a faculty of one. She also primed the pump each morning, ate lunch with her K-8 students in the school yard in good weather, and swept out the classroom each afternoon. My grandmother was widowed in 1946. When I visited my grandmother during the summer, she was eager to talk about the children she taught and I thought that I may well have been the first person to hear many of her stories. I heard each story over and over again because she was eager to talk about her work.

In the 1970s I was part of several school faculties with as many as 80 to 140 teachers in each school. Children came to room 223 where I caused them to learn English/language arts and world cultures in double class periods. There were four other teachers with this assignment for children in the 8th grade and we taught in classrooms spotted around the second floor of the four-story school. We teachers punched the clock in the main office each morning, taught our classes, ate lunch and took our prep periods in the teacher’s lounge and work room, and punched out each late afternoon. Professionally we wore the school’s black and orange colors and told jokes and stories to each other as we supervised the hallways, but I cannot remember professional discussions related to children, teaching, and learning. Certainly, we shared staff meetings and curriculum meetings, but those were “sit and get” meetings. No one asked important questions and or divulged important insights or professional dilemmas. It just wasn’t done.

Today, we must. Individually and collectively we must share by talking, expose by divulging, listen so that we can resolve, and work out our and our colleagues problems so that we all can improve in our profession of causing children to learn. The fate of public education rests on our ability to do so, if not our careers. We cannot afford to work in isolation of each other.

Hence, the hot tub. What is said every night in the hot tub stays in the hot tub and every morning my wife and I are able to return to the challenges of the work we love free of insignificant angst and fortified by a conversation that bolsters our good professional practice. We each tell colleagues in our respective schools about our daily hot tub talks and are encouraged by the increasing number who are finding their own time and places to talk and persons who will listen. In most cases, their conversations are sprouting up at home with a spouse or significant friend. For others, conversations are blossoming at school with fellow teachers who are willing to stay after hours and let down their professional hair. Several are texting each other about their work and one or two have created blogs to share their thoughts.

The isolated teacher needs to be as anachronistic as Ichabod Crane. Find your hot tub place and time to talk and a person to listen and prosper.