ABSTRACT
OUR WORK AS teachers is never neatlybounded-this classroom or this school, fromeight to three or from nine to five-it’s just not that simple or that straightforward. Teaching involves building dozens, even scores, of intense relationships that are not easily shut off like a faucet at the end of the workday; our focus on teaching carries over into every other aspect of our lives and becomes, then, something that’s never very far from our thoughts. Furthermore, our students live in families, communities, towns or cities, a nation, and a country-and so do we. Our lives are of a piece; they aren’t experienced in fragments and segments. When school is treated as an entirely separate event, a little torn scrap of the whole wide world, that treatment does violence to teaching and learning, to healthy development, and to life itself.
