As many of you, my readers know (It’s been at the top of the page for days), I’m in charge of this contest on March 10, 2012 at my school.  A reasonably large number of people have seen the video or visited the school’s website, but… frankly… there’s not been a large number of schools signing up.  Today, I put in a call to forces spiritual and temporal for assistance on finding schools, church youth groups, and Scouting groups (boys and girls) that might participate in the program on that date.  I also asked colleagues to assist in finding schools and friends to communicate with about making this program a success..  

I’m finding that there are a lot of schools that are on vacation. Others are working on existing programs on that date.  And still others are involved in musical commitments of various sorts.  So this is an extension of that “asking for help” thing that Deborah talked about a few weeks ago.

I am not good at asking for help.

In general, teachers are not good at asking for help.  We’re in our classrooms for a great number of hours a day, usually alone, and expected to direct and guide the attentions and energies of a large number of students toward content and processes that are not always interesting to them.  We tend to be solitaries in our field, and even when we get together, we are mostly going through mental agonies of how quickly we can go back to work “with our kids.”  I’m exaggerating, perhaps, but a good many teachers that I know try to avoid meetings and group projects, because frequently those projects are a distraction from what we see as our real work.

Yet maybe… just maybe… it’s time for that to change.

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