At the end of the day, for about five minutes, I sat with a colleague while he played Pink Floyd's The Wall on his personal laptop. We talked about it -- the themes, where we were when it came out -- I was graduating from 8th grade, he saw the movie with a group of friends. The movie had gotten to me later, in high school, along with Tommy. I always want to go right home after school, which is a new feeling for me. I used to sit with kids for hours or just work with a colleague. But now I wondered why I wasn't right out the door. I needed those five minutes. And then I pushed myself out the door.
Last week someone stole my cell phone and I lost all of my contacts -- it's easy to erase your identity when a person has your handset. There are so many people whom I will never see again, whose phone numbers kept me connected to them. It gave me the semblance of a community. Now, I'm a pushy person. There are colleagues I know who have probably never asked for the phone numbers of colleagues with whom they have worked for years. While people worked closely together, they were much more conscious of their privacy in the generations before me. There was no Facebook to casually sign up on, and they probably wouldn't have, anyway. Perhaps they might have shared their "Linked-In" pages. I doubt it. A recent study of new teachers found that many of them are leaving the profession because they feel isolated, too -- although mentoring programs have helped to reduce some attrition. (How Mentoring Programs Can Reduce Teacher Isolation http://cie.asu.edu/volume8/number14/) There's been a lot of writing on the plight of new teachers, on the need for teachers to collaborate, to communicate with the outside world -- but little on what is happening to the school community itself which makes these, and just connecting with long-time colleagues, near impossible.
With all the closings of schools and the shiftings of personnel, there must be scores of teachers who have lost their communities, and some of their only long-term friends. Working together means you talk to each other every day. But without that ritual, you don't have a way to continue the intimacy. Some people will call each other for a while, perhaps. Juxtaposing the feelings you have for the colleagues with whom you were close and trusting and that of terror which has come with this new era of instability makes it harder to talk to anyone, though. You don't know if your friends have changed. Are they still for real? Are you for real?
In the coming weeks I want to look at studies on teacher loneliness and see if anyone is looking at what is happening to the population of teachers in NYC who are being continually displaced. Are they socializing anywhere? Are they eating alone? Sure a lot of teachers have joined the blogosphere. What about those who haven't. What does it mean to all of us that we have lost direct human contact with so many, so instantly.
Anyone who wants to write in, please do.
6 comments:
I know how you feel about techer communities. I am still very clsoeto people I worked with 30 years ago. I guess its age, but I double and triple save everything so I am never dependent on any one media.
Why not try getting active in GEM or ICE? Aside from doing something helpful for teachers, it will introduce you to a whole new great set of contacts.
As always, you are in my heart and in my prayers. May you find the peace and happiness you deserve.
I have found that joining political groups only feeds my anxiety.
Just a thought. Those people are fantastic and very supportive.
You know, they're supportive and they're not. On the one hand, they understand you. On the other hand, they don't really have a plan to help you deal with the reality of the present. When I was looking for work -- out of fear of being an ATR forever -- I was scorned for looking and continually made afraid by the doom and gloom reports about the ATR's. Then I found out a person who was part of one of those organizations already had an in at another school -- so he didn't have to worry about his future the way I did after his school closed. When I talked to someone at another group about what was going on at my school, he offered no help. He was just interested in how I might be useful in his initiatives. And I once had a conversation with someone in ICE about elections. That person said that ICE "didn't want to win" but to just get issues on the agenda. I have learned over the years that if you don't play to win, you don't win. When I teach my students, I play to win -- I want them to beat out the exam system and to learn. I could just teach them in a way which made a point but didn't help them immediately. But, that wouldn't help them. For example, we could never do practice tests, on the theory that they should be able to apply their skills without doing them. But, I know the truth about the language of the tests vs. real English. The point has been made that at-risk students have trouble with standardized tests. It's time to help them beat them.
For that matter, the UFT just stopped the closing of 19 schools. The infamous lawsuit that several Rubber Room inmates filed against the DOE and the UFT did nothing but cause a lot of people to go unrepresented. I told the folks at ICE that I thought the lawsuit was irresponsible (I have very good legal instincts) and yet they did nothing to expose its problems. I think that there is now a kind of cottage industry of anti-UFT groups who get together and gripe and predict the worst rather than really fighting to create change. Yes, sometimes they get issues on the map. TAG is an exception to this rule, I think -- they did a great job of getting the ATR issue and the Rubber Room issue discussed. The truth is that it took a lot of people talking directly to Randi in the past two years to get her to see the RR inmates in a new light. Friends of hers starting being sent to the reassignment centers.
I would be all for joining these groups if they looked at both the practical needs of the people who invest their time in them and if they played to win. I'm not interested in academic conferences aimed to create papers only or people just out to be Ralph Nader.
ICE has been very helpful to my friends and to me on very practical levels -- I don't know why they don't play to win. If they created a kind of network to help people survive -- pragmatic advice -- and wrote about how many times they have helped people, then people might see them as necessary to a winning team. At the same time, they have been part of a team of people who have helped me which has included UFT reps. They could share information and strategies for helping teachers and make each other stronger. Right now, however, I find that when I go to the blogs of all these groups, I find more reasons to be afraid, fewer strategies to improve my situation. Whereas, I've had UFT reps be my life support. I can't get on the protest line if I'm out of work. A lot of the members of some of these groups are either retired or have some connections of their own. My best reference passed away and some of my others are in similarly bad situations.
On a very practical level, I have asked members of these groups to help me find viable connections at schools and pass my resume around with no response. If they can't provide a network to help people better survive, and they don't aim to win, then it's Ralph Nader land. Ralph Nader, for all intents and purposes, got us 8 years of Shrub.
ICE does play to win.
That's not what I was told by a long-standing member. One major issue is funding. It's 30,000 just to do a mailing to all UFT members. Maybe that was just his perception.
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