1. I don't want to 'lessen' my experiences.
Something I'm often scared of doing is losing some valuable aspect of an experience I have had by describing it to someone else. It's as if I'm worried an inexplicable part, the 'it factor,' that je ne sais quoi (if I spoke French, which I don't, so never mind) will be diminished. There are moments that every teacher has where you think, "Ah...this is it. This is why I teach. It's all worth it." Of course, this is probably immediately followed by the worst moment of your teaching career (or at least the day) and you promptly retract anything positive you'd just thought.
But seriously, as cliché as it sounds, those are the experiences that get you through, that you grab hold of and return to when you are huddled on the table in the corner of your classroom out of sight of the door with the lights turned off during your planning period hoping that the janitor doesn't come in to clean your floors for another 10 minutes because you need a chance to remember why you chose to be a teacher, why you shouldn't just go home, and how you're going to quit being the dramatic, overly sensitive, naive first-year teacher you hear about during teacher training and become the teacher in those inspirational films about education portrayed by Hilary Swank or Edward James Olmos or Michelle Pfeiffer (and hopefully not Cameron Diaz or Arnold Schwarzenegger or Ben Stein).
I think those moments are so powerful in a teacher's mind and so personal that describing them to someone else might weaken them in some way. I know that I don't have that same way with words so many authors do that I admire, and I worry that I'm not able to describe things the way I replay them in my mind. They are so vivid there. It's like that moment when you wake up from a dream and everything is still so clear and it all makes sense, but then you try to explain what was happening to someone else and it is suddenly impossible to get across just how incredible/horrifying/bizarre your dream was. That is an unbelievably frustrating feeling, but what's worse is the harder you try to describe it, the fuzzier the image becomes in your mind, and after a little while, you can't even remember what your dream was about. I don't want to forget what those moments were like simply because I can't adequately express myself. (Not to mention how frustrating it is to be on the receiving end of that dream story...)
2. I'm not sure people actually care.
I don't mean this in a whiny, self-deprecating way- I'm perfectly okay with no one ever reading this. What I do mean is that in general, relating these experiences is difficult because of the wide range of people I could interact with. I'm a teacher. I go to school five days out of the week, I plan, grade, or think about teaching every night, and, for better or worse, it's what I end up talking about a lot of the time. This gets old for non-teachers. Hey, it gets old for teachers too, I just can't seem to stop! (To be fair, teaching gives you a lot of material for entertaining stories, so at least there's that.)
I have found that sharing those truly memorable experiences with a friend who is a coworker is ideal, a friend who is a teacher somewhere else is a close second, followed by other educators in general (that teacher intuition, I guess), and then non-teacher friends (supportive/interested, but a true understanding? It's hard to say.). Does that mean my relationships with my non-teacher friends are going to weaken over time because I won't want the most important parts of my career to feel 'less than' in some way? Or because I won't even try sharing those stories as that would run the risk of having them be underappreciated? I don't think so. I hope not. But I still wonder.
3. I'm not Erin Gruwell or Jaime Escalante or any of those other SuperTeachers.
I'm not teaching the 'unteachables' or working in unimaginable conditions. Some of my students have experienced things I will fortunately never have to go through and that has to be worked with. There have been challenging situations in my classroom that I have had to handle. These make for great teaching/learning moments and some interesting stories, but Stand and Deliver this is not. Ideally, I get to look back at this and remember an event I normally might not have or realize something about my teaching I wouldn't have before. Metacognition, right? Educational buzzword!
Chalk's depiction of teaching in a public school:
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