Chapter 5:
Teamwork Makes the Dream Work
There are two types of collaboration, the first being work collaboration. This is when you work with other stakeholders – teachers, administrators, parents and students – to improve your classroom and teaching methods. In these situations, you discuss, imagine, create, and tweak your approaches in the classroom to reach more students. This type of collaboration centered around my job.
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Then there was a second type of teacher collaboration.
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The Thursday before spring break during my first year of teaching, Lindsay White, an MTC second year at the time, invited me to join her for a small birthday celebration at Painting With a Twist. These shops have been popping up all over recently (or at least it seems that way). For a fee of $35, you are shown how to paint a pre-chosen picture as you drink wine.
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After a hectic day at school – students and teachers alike were anxious for spring break to start – Lindsay picked me up at my apartment before whisking us away to Painting With a Twist. We focused on painting a woman, using even brush strokes, and blending the background colors just right from
7-9 p.m. that night. We turned off our brains from teaching for two hours and enjoyed ourselves. I also walked away with a sweet painting and a Polaroid to commemorate the night.
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My friendship with Lindsay helped me survive my first year of teaching. All two of us made up H.W. Byers High School’s English department, so I originally thought we would be spending a lot time together trying to coordinate English-related lessons (which we did sometimes) or I would be asking for her teaching advice (which I did all the time). Honestly, though, most of our time spent together was doing stuff like going out to eat, venting about our school days, or some other non-school-related activity, like bowling. This kind of collaboration did not directly impact student learning, but it did keep me sane, which indirectly benefitted my students. (A sane Ms. Lindsay is a more functional
Ms. Lindsay, after all.)
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In my first year of teaching, I am sure my MTC professors would have loved to see that I had turned to a veteran teacher for help, but my school was tiny. We only had about 12 teachers in the main school building, half of which were other MTC teachers. I was also in the new wing with three (of the four) second-year MTC teachers. I was surrounded by MTC teachers, and I turned to them for support. I relied on them because I felt they understood my predicament and my experiences the best.
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This is not to say I didn’t talk to the other teachers at my school. In fact, I frequently ate lunch with the two longest-standing veteran teachers at Byers. We would talk about students, problem classes, and the school in general. Whenever I had some kind of difficulty, they happily gave me advice, empathy, or both. I guess the important difference was that the MTC teachers shared the alternate-route-teaching perspective as me. They were also newer teachers, like me, and were dealing with similar new-teacher issues within the classroom.
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When I went to other teachers for support, it wasn’t usually for classroom materials or lesson plan ideas. I needed more “adult time” in my life. I didn’t truly feel like much of an adult when I first began the Mississippi Teacher Corps, until I spent half my day with students. I cared about my students, but spending all day with impulsive, immature, moody teenagers can wear you out. And make you realize you are in fact an adult. Maybe not the adultiest adult, but an adult nonetheless. The point is that I didn’t spend nearly enough time talking to adults and that’s what I sought most from other teachers at my school: social collaboration.