There was the squealing pig incident. There was the pinto pony design cowboy hat incident. There was the flying food faculty room, the stalking camera principal, the secret love affair, and a hundred other tales teachers don’t usually tell—except to their closest teaching buds. The key to life, if you are a teacher, is other teachers.

Teaching partners—teachers who are your friends—make the job worth doing. In an often cold and hostile world of angry parents, harried administrators, and confusing ethics, teaching buds are life itself. Having a close teaching partner not only makes your professional life better, it makes you a better professional.

My teaching partner is a 25-year veteran special education teacher and psychologist. She knows things. We have similar teaching styles and are both organization weirdoes. We have lists on our desks, lists on our office white board, and about four or five hundred calendars with everything we do carefully scheduled.

We like the other teachers at school, but rarely eat in the faculty room. We are just too busy. Most lunches are working lunches spent discussing the day’s crisis or analyzing some troubled student. We can do more business with a glance than most people accomplish in an hour-long discussion. We almost read each other’s mind.

She teaches math, and I teach English. We share many of the same students and many of the same problems. The nice thing about this partnership is that she knows more than I do. She is a paperwork whiz. When we talk about our kids, she adds an educated and experienced perspective that helps me see and understand more. She does the same thing for me when we talk about our school, our administrators, and other teachers. Age, education, and experience have given her a kind of wisdom that is invaluable. I learn something from her every day. She has learned things from me too.

In addition to the usual sharing of knowledge and insight, it is nice to work with someone you trust. I know that if I mess something up, she will see it and fix it. If I get behind or mixed up or forget something, she is there to help me get my act back together. She has my back. I have hers. Together we have weathered many storms and shared many funny stories. Going to work with my teaching partner feels safe. Ours is one of the most difficult teaching assignments, but together we make it work. We make it worthwhile.

I have worked in different schools and always find someone who is a special friend. I once had a friend who taught English with me. He was more experienced and had a wicked funny sense of humor. He taught me to be more human. He taught me to trust my kids more. He taught me to trust another teacher and to try harder to be a teacher someone else could trust. And of course, there was that baby pig loose in the classroom incident.

I had a friend who was a drama teacher, the best I have ever seen. She was very smart and very funny. She could see people with a cruel accuracy that was astonishing, but almost always ended her bleak observations with an equally kind and reassuring characterization. When our administration did something we felt was terrible, she did not get angry, as I did. She sat down and began writing a letter. “This is how I respond to conflict,” she said. “Writing this letter may not change them, but it will change me. It will help me cope with what they have done.” She was a woman of hope and literacy and gentleness.

I once taught in a big inner-city high school special education department. I worked with two men who became close friends. One was huge…six and a half feet or more. He was gentle and friendly. He just sort of wandered around classrooms filled with violence and anger, filling up the spaces with his patient, quiet caring. The kids would feel this giant mountain of a person easing up on them, and they would simply calm down. He usually didn’t have to say anything. If a fight broke out, he just scooped up two or three kids in his arms and gave everyone a hug until the violence stopped. Then he would just sit with them and let the dust settle. I used to write his lesson plans because I felt it was something I could do in exchange for the calming, positive influence he brought to our team-taught classes. I did what he could not do, and he did what I could not do. Together, we transformed rooms full of angry, alienated, uneducated kids into readers and writers and people who could speak in appropriate language and tones.

Teaching partners are out there. You have to see them and recognize them, but they are around. Find a friend. Learn from them and help them learn from you. Work together. Go into each other’s classrooms. Trade kids and lesson plans. Eat lunch together and give each other little presents. Life is better with a teaching bud.


Dr. Steven W. Simpson is President of Simpson Communications. Dr. Simpson worked for nine years as a public high school language arts and journalism teacher in Washington State.  He taught business communications and writing courses for the University of Phoenix, has developed and managed several Web site projects and works as a Communications Consultant, Writer, Editor and Web Development Manager.  Copyright 2006, Dr. Steven W. Simpson, Simpson Communications.  Used with permission.