The only way that you progress as a teacher is that you talk with other teachers. Here are the most important people in your school and how to harness the power of teaching colleagues.
custodians
The custodian is the second most important adult on campus (see, the principal’s secretary). Throughout my career, our janitors were understaffed and overworked, especially since my aging campus received nothing but cosmetic upgrades.
Go out of your way to know the janitors. Ask about their families. Tell them how much you appreciate their hard work. Buy them a pizza or doughnuts once in a while. The best investment I made every year was the case of beer that was surreptitiously placed in the trunk of my custodian’s car as we headed to winter break.
Any time I needed something, I was almost always moved to the front of the line. Take care of your custodians, and they will take care of you.
faculty lounge
I was not hired for my first teaching position because of any classroom potential I may have flashed during my job interview. I was hired because I agreed to coach basketball.
This meant that I was expected to sit at the “coaches table” at lunch in the faculty lounge (nicknamed “The Bunker”). I listened to these old-timers tell (and retell) their teaching and coaching war stories. It was entertaining at first, but it wasn’t long before I realized that lunch in the faculty lounge had become nothing more than a daily thirty-minute bitch session about students. To top it off, one coach would yell, “Nooooooo!” when the bell rang to return to class. He yelled this every day.
I relocated to a different table, one that was made up of teachers (from different content areas) who believed in kids. I was the youngest at the table, and, yes, there was a complaint here and there about students, but we also had several discussions about how to be better teachers. Plus this table had some excellent joke tellers. Laughter is important. Shifting to this new table was one of the best decisions I made in my career.
Writing this now reminds me of an old proverb: “Tell me who your friends are, and I will tell you who you are.” The contrast between my two lunch tables serves as a reminder that who you hang out with can greatly impact your professional growth, values, behavior, and reputation.
lunch buddies
Teaching is stressful, and it helps to have others to commiserate with. For the last fifteen years of my career I had lunch with the same cast of characters.
We grew together as colleagues and friends. We shared the trials and tribulations of our personal lives. We attended weddings and funerals and talked about the difficulties in raising our own children. Nothing was off-limits with this group. We told jokes and our language was, shall we say, a bit on the salty side. We tried to out-pun one another. We laughed so hard we cried. On Fridays we rotated and someone was assigned to bring a video clip that would make us laugh. (My favorite was the Saturday Night Live® skit where Kate McKinnon’s character describes to a government agency official what happened when she was abducted by aliens.) Sometimes we even discussed teaching. But mostly, lunchtime was therapeutic, a way to relieve the pressures of our profession.
the principal’s secretary
This is where the power resides in your school. Job number one is to get on the good side of the principal’s secretary, who is one of the hardest workers on campus. Chat them up. Don’t forget to get them a birthday card. Buy them a Christmas gift every year. Get—and stay—on their good side, because the day will come when you need a conference request form expedited, or something ordered from the district warehouse ASAP, or help with aligning a specific substitute teacher.
This is why you grin and bear it when they inappropriately espouse political views that run contrary to yours. That doesn’t matter. What matters is staying on their good side.
