Isolation is one of the hardest aspects to deal with when teaching in a small school. Everyone is always occupied with teaching or supervising, and I don’t have a like-minded, subject area colleague to talk with. In the past, I’ve used Connected University http://cu.classroom.com/logon.asp to stay connected with enthusiastic teachers. I’ve enjoyed all the classes I’ve taken with it. Besides learning something new, the Discussion Board allowed me to interact daily with other teachers. Unfortunately, it does cost – about 400USD, and takes a bit of Internet time, which is very short for me lately. However, I have enrolled in the PBS TeacherLine program http://teacherline.pbs.org/teacherline/ , which is self-paced. I worked on it over the week of vacation, but haven’t looked at it since. I need to get busy with that.
This week is Drug Awareness week on the island. On Monday grades 6-12 went to see a motivational speaker. He was born with no legs or arms, but did not allow people to “handicap” him – tell him that he couldn’t do something. He was interesting, funny, and thought provoking, yet didn’t speak much about drugs, other than, “Don’t do them.” In the afternoon, the students visited a volunteer drug rehab center. Some of the recovering addicts spoke with the students. The students had a lot of questions, mostly “Is it true…” or “I heard that . . .” types of questions.
I know what you mean by isolation. I taught art grades 1-12 in a rural Kansas school for 12 yearsand by the time I left to become an education consultant I was so lonely and feeling cut off from like-minded people. I am becoming addicted to blogging now and wish I'd known about it back then. I now spend a lot of time connecting schools and resources over distance an am thrilled with the possibilities. What we can't forget in all this is that the same technologies that help kids connect can help teachers share and support one another.
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