For the first time in a long time, I had a different first day of school.
After sixteen years of beginning the year in an off-site program, I walked into Joplin High School not as the teacher of Flex or Missouri Option, but as the new In-School Detention facilitator. I had imagined that the first day would be quiet. I expected to listen, observe, learn the routines of the building, and begin understanding the rhythms of a school I had technically belonged to for years but had never completely inhabited.
Instead, students arrived.
Several of them.
Whatever careful picture I had constructed of my first day disappeared almost immediately. There were questions to answer, expectations to establish, personalities to read, and problems to solve. I learned more in those first hours than I probably could have learned from a week of observation.
There is, after all, a difference between studying a system and becoming part of it.
That difference is what I keep returning to.
For much of my career, independence has been one of the measures by which I understood my own competence. Programs such as Missouri Option and Flex are unusual by design. Their practitioners frequently exist somewhere alongside the traditional structures of a school. The people who truly understand the work may be scattered across a state rather than gathered in the same building. Colleagues can be supportive. Administrators can be helpful. Students can fill every hour of the day. Yet there remains a particular kind of isolation that comes from doing specialized work that few people around you completely understand.
It is important to distinguish that kind of isolation from simply being alone.
Psychologists John Cacioppo and Louise Hawkley wrote that social species “fare poorly when isolated,” but Cacioppo’s work also emphasized that loneliness is fundamentally a matter of perceived social isolation. A person can be surrounded by people and still experience disconnection.
That distinction helps me understand something about my previous work that I could never quite name.
I was rarely alone.
I had students. I had colleagues. I had administrators. I had friends at work. I belonged to the district and, at least institutionally, to the high school.
But there is another kind of loneliness that comes from not being easily understood.
When your work is unusual, there are fewer people available to recognize themselves in your experiences. There are fewer opportunities to walk next door and ask, Does this happen to you too? Fewer people immediately understand the strange combination of responsibilities, frustrations, victories, compromises, and little rituals that define the work. Your professional life becomes difficult to translate.
Perhaps that is one of the hidden costs of specialization: not necessarily isolation from people, but isolation from recognition.
The American philosopher and social psychologist George Herbert Mead argued that the self is not created privately and then carried into society as a finished object. Instead, identity develops through interaction. “The self,” he wrote, “is essentially a social structure, and it arises in social experience."
I find that idea increasingly compelling.
We become ourselves partly through the people around us. Other people function as mirrors, not because they determine who we are, but because their responses help us recognize the identities we inhabit. Teacher. Colleague. Mentor. Beginner. Expert. Friend. Member of a community.
Those identities become real partly because other people recognize them.
When recognition becomes scarce, identity can become unusually self-contained. You learn to provide your own validation. You become your own measure of whether the work is succeeding. You become accustomed to explaining what you do rather than simply belonging among people who already understand.
Over time, I became very good at that kind of independence.
Perhaps too good.
I learned to solve problems myself, build routines myself, explain the program myself, advocate for it myself, and carry much of its identity myself. There was genuine satisfaction in that autonomy. I am proud of the independence those years required of me.
But independence has a shadow.
When self-reliance becomes habitual, it can become difficult to distinguish I can do this myself from I should have to do this myself. Competence quietly becomes self-sufficiency. Being needed becomes being responsible for everything. Eventually, carrying the weight alone can become so familiar that it stops feeling heavy simply because one has forgotten what it feels like when someone else takes hold of the other end.
That is why I have been thinking about Fernand Léger’s Les Constructeurs (The Constructors) from 1950.
The painting is filled with bodies, ladders, beams, cables, and geometric forms. Workers occupy different levels of a rising structure. No single figure dominates the composition. No worker appears capable of completing the task alone. Meaning emerges from their relationship to one another and to the thing they are collectively constructing.
What interests me most is that Léger’s workers do not disappear into the structure.
They remain individuals.
Each occupies his own space. Each has a body, a task, a perspective. Yet none is independent of the others. The strength of the composition comes precisely from the tension between individuality and participation.
That feels like the psychological distinction I am beginning to understand in my own work.
For years, I may have confused autonomy with independence.
They are not the same thing.
Self-determination theory, developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, identifies autonomy, competence, and relatedness as basic psychological needs. Significantly, autonomy does not require detachment from others. A person can act with agency and still exist within relationships of mutual dependence. Relatedness—the experience of being connected, valued, and significant to other people—exists alongside autonomy rather than in opposition to it.
That seems almost embarrassingly obvious when written down.
Yet culturally, we often treat independence as the pinnacle of maturity. Children grow up and become independent. Successful professionals require less supervision. Experienced employees handle things themselves. Leaders solve problems.
We praise the person who can carry everything.
We rarely ask whether that person should have to.
Psychologists Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary argued that the desire to belong is a “powerful, fundamental, and extremely pervasive motivation.” Their review of psychological research suggested that human beings do not merely enjoy belonging; we are oriented toward forming and maintaining meaningful social bonds.
Belonging, then, is not a reward we receive after proving our independence.
It is one of the conditions under which human beings flourish.
That realization changes the meaning of my first day.
What struck me most was not simply that I had people around me. It was that those people made space for me among them.
The teachers at Joplin High School have welcomed me with a warmth that has meant more to me than they probably realize. They have answered questions, offered help, introduced themselves, shared information, sent work, explained routines, and treated me as though I belong in the building.
The administrative team has been equally important. They have been responsive when I have needed answers, supportive as I have begun inhabiting a new role, and genuinely excited about what this position might become.
These are ordinary professional behaviors.
That does not make them insignificant.
Perhaps communities are built largely from ordinary gestures repeated consistently enough that they begin to communicate something deeper.
We see you.
Your work matters.
You are part of this.
Social identity theory gives psychological weight to those seemingly small messages. Henri Tajfel described social identity as the part of our self-concept that emerges from knowing that we belong to particular social groups and from the emotional significance we attach to those memberships. Later research has likewise found that meaningful group identification can provide people with purpose, support, agency, and a stronger sense of belonging.
The important word there is not merely group.
It is identity.
There is a considerable difference between working near other people and understanding oneself as one of them.
I think that difference is part of what I felt on my first day.
For years, I worked for the high school while remaining somewhat outside its daily life. My peers in alternative education were often elsewhere. The practices that defined my work were not always the practices that defined the work happening in the building. My professional identity was strongly tied to the program I operated.
Now something different is happening.
I am becoming part of a we.
Not merely my program.
Our school.
Our students.
Our teachers.
Our administrators.
Our work.
That movement from I toward we does not erase the self. Paradoxically, community can make the self more intelligible. When other people recognize our role, respond to it, depend upon it, and allow us to depend upon theirs, they help give contours to who we are.
I know more clearly what my work is because I can see where it meets the work of others.
Administration provides the disciplinary structure. Classroom teachers continue the academic work. Counselors and support staff address needs that extend beyond my role. I create a space where consequence and academic continuity can coexist. Students temporarily removed from their classrooms do not have to become academically disconnected from the larger school.
My work begins where someone else’s intersects with it.
I do my part.
Others do theirs.
And together we support something none of us could accomplish individually.
That is interdependence.
I used to hear the phrase “cog in the machine” almost entirely as an insult. It suggests anonymity, disposability, and the loss of the individual within some enormous bureaucracy.
But perhaps the metaphor deserves reconsideration.
A cog sitting alone on a table may be perfectly manufactured. It may be strong. It may be beautifully engineered. It may be entirely intact.
It is also useless.
Its purpose emerges in relationship.
One tooth meets another. Movement is received and transmitted. Energy passes through the mechanism. No individual part becomes the machine, but the machine cannot function without its parts.
For years, I had become accustomed to being much more of the machine than one of its components.
Now I have a particular place.
Oddly, that does not feel like becoming smaller.
It feels like becoming connected.
Research on social identity and well-being sometimes describes meaningful group membership as a kind of “social cure,” not because every group is healthy or because community magically solves human problems, but because positive social identities can provide psychological resources such as meaning, purpose, support, control, and connection.
I felt some of those resources on my first day.
Most obviously, I felt supported.
But I also felt something closer to relief.
There is relief in discovering that a question can be asked instead of silently solved.
There is relief in sending a message and receiving an answer.
There is relief in knowing that someone else understands the larger system.
There is relief in realizing that other people are invested in whether you succeed.
And perhaps most of all, there is relief in recognizing that needing other people does not invalidate the competence developed over years of working independently.
There is a peculiar vulnerability in beginning again after nearly two decades in education. Experience does not eliminate uncertainty. In some ways, experience makes uncertainty more visible because I know enough to recognize the limits of what I know.
I arrived at the high school with experience, education, convictions, routines, and ideas.
I also arrived as a beginner.
My new colleagues have allowed both things to be true.
I have something to contribute here.
I also have things to learn.
I can support others.
I can allow myself to be supported.
I can possess autonomy without demanding isolation.
I can be competent without being self-sufficient.
I can belong to a community without surrendering the identity I spent years constructing.
That may be the lesson hidden inside Léger’s construction site.
None of the workers needs to become weaker so another worker can be strong. No one loses dignity because someone else carries another beam. Their individual competence becomes meaningful precisely because it participates in collective action.
Perhaps professional identity works the same way.
For much of my career, I measured my value partly by how much I could carry alone. I took pride in solving the problem, managing the program, navigating the exceptions, and keeping things moving.
There was virtue in learning independence.
But there was also isolation.
On this first day, I caught a glimpse of another way of being a teacher.
The structure was already standing around me.
Teachers were teaching. Administrators were administrating. Counselors were counseling. Secretaries were answering phones and solving problems before most of us knew the problems existed. Bells rang. Students moved through hallways. Messages traveled between classrooms and offices. Hundreds of people performed hundreds of interconnected tasks, most of them invisible to everyone except the people who depended upon them.
And somewhere inside all of that, there was a place for me.
Not above it.
Not apart from it.
Inside it.
Perhaps that is why the welcome I have received has affected me so deeply. These teachers and administrators have done more than help me begin a new assignment. Through a hundred small acts of recognition, they have begun helping me construct a new professional identity.
They have shown me that I can be needed without needing to be everything.
They have reminded me that belonging is not the opposite of individuality.
And they have demonstrated that community does not diminish autonomy; the right community gives autonomy somewhere meaningful to live.
I do not need to be the architect of the whole structure.
I do not need to carry every beam.
I do not need to understand every mechanism before I begin.
I only need to learn where my hands belong.
For years, I learned how to be independent.
Perhaps this next chapter will teach me something harder and, ultimately, more human: how to be interdependent.
Looking again at Léger’s builders, I no longer see individuals swallowed by machinery.
I see people whose identities become clearer because they are engaged in common work.
I see strength distributed rather than concentrated.
I see individual people making something none of them could make alone.
And after so many years of learning how to build largely by myself, I am profoundly grateful to find myself standing among the builders.
