I have just come from the advanced candidate retreat for national board certified teacher candidates. This is the third one of these I have done and it just feels like so much therapy. My comments on my session “Looking at Student Work” were fairly good. Every year I feel the same emotions I felt when I didn’t achieve and I went to the retreat. I can almost see signs hanging around peoples necks with thier states of recovery from the rejection. Some have “hopeful” others “mourning” but the hardest ones are the ones in “bargaining” or “denial”. They keep trying to convince me that they did something right OR that I should tell them something new. I like to start each coaching interaction with the question: : “How can I not help you?”IT feels like that. I don’t have the answers they want I have to keep asking them questions until it seems like they have answered the question for themselves. I Imagine it is how my sculpture teachers felt when they were trying to help us understand why our sculpture was bad without telling us that we will never be Van GOgh. Then, trying to do all this when the students are convinced they are the next great artist of the world.