1997, Charlottesville, VirginiaBy Marla Muntner

We were like oil and water, my colleague and I. She was the fingernail scraping my chalkboard, and I was the Yankee intruder in her genteel South.

Patricia decorated her room with castles, knights, and ladies — all part of her King Arthur unit. Across the hall, my bulletin boards and posters focused on global awareness and multicultural education.

When she spoke of her membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution, I thought of my immigrant great grandmother and her work as a union organizer. And while Patricia’s history instruction focused on the heroism of British colonists, mine focused on the perspectives of American Indians and the enslaved.

OK, so we had different perspectives. Who doesn’t? But we had other issues too. One afternoon, on her way out, Patricia came into my classroom to tell me about a geography lesson she’d designed. She flashed the 28 state maps she’d gotten for free and described how she’d used them effectively with her students to build map skills.

I was impressed and asked if I could borrow the maps and try the lesson with my own class. “Oh, no,” she beamed, “I wouldn’t want them to get worn out from overuse. You understand.”

She was right. I did understand. I began to see Patricia’s picture of our four-member teaching team as an endless game of show-and-tell: she was the show and did all the telling.

Patricia planned solo field trips, one-class plays, and colonial-craft workshops while the other members of our teaching team — Kimberly, Ava, and I — scrambled to keep up. The parents of Patricia’s students were thrilled. Meanwhile, the mood on our team grew cool and detached.

Now, in my family, we don’t ignore tensions. We toss ‘em on the dinner table and bat them around for fun. It can be a little disconcerting to some, but I didn’t know that. Not yet. So when I became team leader in my second year at that school, I figured I’d address our unfortunate team dynamics head-on.

We agreed to attend a team retreat early in the fall, off campus, someplace neutral, where we could take a break and discuss our issues in a productive way. On the chosen afternoon, we drove separately to the conference room our principal had reserved at a nearby office complex.

As soon as we walked in, the room just didn’t feel right to me. The table was huge, its edges hard and jagged, the room too corporate, not like our more human school environment. But there was no turning back.

I’d carefully planned our warm-up activity, betting that a little quiet time after the hectic school day would do us all some good. I laid our first task right there on that fake-mahogany table: since there were four of us on the team, I had cut a paper circle into quarters. I was pleased with the symbolism as I slid the paper wedges toward each of my teammates and asked them to add one sentence telling what they wanted from their team.

We took a few minutes to think and write, and then it was time to share. Kimberly, Ava, and I each read what we had written, and we found that we were surprisingly in sync: we each wanted help and support from our teammates.

Then it was Patricia’s turn. “I want an audience,” she said.

An audience? I suffered a rare moment of speechlessness and sat blinking in the fluorescent light. Kimberly raised her brow at me. Ava stared at the table. Patricia smiled.

An audience?

After a short, tense exchange, we agreed to adjourn to reflect on this new and useful information. We’d meet the following week at a less formal place, a local restaurant where we hoped to relax together over food and drink.

As I found my seat at the table, I felt a nervous hopefulness, a sort of anticipation, like when you go to the dentist and know you’ll be uncomfortable for a while, but that your teeth will feel crisp and clean when it’s finally over.

I sat next to Patricia. She explained how she felt left out all the time and how awkward this was for her. I listened for a while and then just sat, watching her mouth moving, finally interrupting, “But you can’t keep doing things to separate yourself from the team and then complain about not being included!”

The table went quiet. Kimberly and Ava waited, their eyes wide. Patricia looked as if she’d been slapped, tears welling. She groped around under the table, finally finding her heavy brown purse and pulling it onto her lap, and she choked out, “I’m sorry, I can’t do this!”

As she stood, her chair squeaked and bumped across the tiles, and she turned on her heels and fled the restaurant, leaving the three of us sitting at the table with her empty seat.

I suffered another moment of speechlessness, capped with, “I’m sorry, you guys.” My head hung, I knew I’d ruined it for the team, that this wasn’t the way we’d wanted things to go. We watched Patricia’s car pull out of the parking lot and then looked at each other.

“Is she coming back?”

I hadn’t even noticed the waitress standing next to me.

“What would you like me to do with the cake she brought? Should I light the candles?”

“Cake?” I winced. It was my birthday. Kimberly and Ava filled in the blanks: Patricia had made a cake. From scratch. To help me celebrate.

Marla Muntner is a former teacher currently working on a freelance basis as a writer, editor, and curriculum designer.

Posted by Common Ties on Monday, January 14th, 2008 | Email This Post

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