An Education

When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years. ~Mark Twain

A few weeks ago I ran into a former colleague who had retired back in 2010. Eleanor was the team leader of the sixth-grade interdisciplinary team I was assigned to when I first started teaching; she was social studies, I was English, Cheri was science, and Wes, another new teacher like me, was math. Eleanor was a veteran of the classroom, and she was gracious and supportive of the two newbies she was charged with leading, but she was older than we were, and we found some of her ideas old-fashioned and rigid. For the most part, though, we all worked together well. 

Although Wes left the team first to teach social studies on another sixth-grade team and then to teach at a DOD school in Iceland, Eleanor and I remained teammates until 2000, when I expressed an interest in taking on the leadership role. Initially very supportive, she ended up leaving the team to take another position in our building. To be honest, it was probably easier to be the team leader outside of her shadow, and it was a job I kept for 20 years, perhaps pissing off my own fair share of new teachers along the way.