At my next school PLCs were already in place and no one knew quite what to do with me yet again. Since I was now teaching math every day, and still putting my book on my head to walk next door to the real math teacher for help, I assigned myself to the math group. The fact that my best teacher-friend in the building was in the group had nothing to do with it, I swear! Almost four years later when I left that district I had some amazing friends, had learned even more about math (don't worry, just rationalize the denominator, it's radical), and felt completely and utterly useless every time we had a meeting. It got to the point where I'd go to the room, sign in, sit in a corner and do my own work while they conducted their PLC. I was jumping through a hoop to make the powers that be happy so they could say all their teachers were part of a PLC.
Which brings us up to the present, when I am still PLCing alone. Last Friday we had a half day PD so our grade level subject teams could finish up work on common assessments. Since we have two different middle schools with an average of two teachers for each grade/subject everyone gathered at one building and worked in groups of about four to put the final touches on the first of several major common assessments. ESL is no different in that the same classes are taught at both buildings and need common assessments. The difference is that I am the teacher of all the classes and so I was left creating common assessments with me, myself and I. At the end of the afternoon I sent the following text to my elementary and high school counterparts: "After hours of discussion I am pleased to announce that me, myself and I have come to an agreement. Meads and Hillside have common assessments for all ESL classes!" This lead to a chain of messages between the four of us that included many laughing emojis and proved that linguistic people really can entertain themselves with nothing but words and we probably shouldn't be left unsupervised for so long. The four of us had a grand time laughing and joking back and forth about how "me and myself couldn't agree but as department head I made an executive decision" and giving advice such as "make me think it was my idea", but the whole thing really got me thinking (especially since we have another hour and a half PD this week).
ESL is a very rewarding field of education, I love it and can't imagine doing anything else, but it is also a very lonely field. At its core teaching is a collaborative profession and not something you can do well in isolation. Show me a teacher who sits in his/her classroom all day and never socializes or trades ideas with the teachers around him/her and I'll show you a teacher who won't be teaching much longer. The longer you are in a district the more relationships you have, that's natural, but the nice thing about most teaching positions is that there is usually a built-in support / collaboration relationship in your grade level and subject partner. Only in the smallest schools do you find only one math teacher or a single third grade teacher, but ESL (and sometimes SPED) is different, there is usually only one ESL teacher per school (or more than one school---I'm at two and our elementary teachers have three schools each) and that teacher usually works with multiple grade levels. Being split among so many areas is hard and there's little time left to build the relationships that you want to have, making the process of finding your niche among the larger staff longer. It's one of the many reasons why I am so thankful to be part of an amazing ESL team. We may still have to PLC alone but we aren't lonely, I know that they are just a text, phone call or email away. I'm really looking forward to the end of this round of testing so we can get back to our Friday collegial meetings (which the team rescheduled so I could still be a part of when the district changed my class schedule--see, I told you they were amazing)!