It’s almost as if new teachers must go through some rite of passage before he or she can be fully included in the “League of Surviving Educators”. This concept is rather counterproductive and counterintuitive when one thinks about it. I had a most unpleasant student teaching situation. My cooperating teacher was a jerk, and completely unhelpful. I barely made it through this experience, and the only thing that kept me going was the fact that I didn’t want to chuck four years of schooling out the window. I desperately needed a mentor; someone to help me through the inevitable rough patches a student teacher faces. It didn’t happen, and I worried that it would be this bad when I got my first teaching job.

Luckily, for me, I was surrounded by a bunch of other teachers who helped me survive, and even flourish in my first year as an educator. John Donne, an English poet wrote in his meditation, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624) that “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main…” Forgiving the obvious sexist language that was apropos for the time, Donne, was correct, no person can survive the teaching profession alone. We are all part of the collective whole.