Most people are at least a little bit lonely. There’s some good evolutionary value to this – we tend to cling a bit more tightly to each other, to be a little more aware of each other’s needs at least in part because most of us usually feel a bit needy. That vestigial feeling of loneliness motivates us to take action, to preserve connections and to overcome the good reasons to tell others to bug off. Some of my friends and colleagues seem to know this – but the younger ones are a little bit less likely to know it. In fact, students often labor under the illusion that they themselves are the only ones who often feel lonely.

 
Most teachers of middle- and high-school students can see that even when they’re clearly among the most popular kids in class, students often feel freakishly lonely – not just melancholy because they want to connect more with others, but certain at some level that they feel this more often and more deeply than other kids do. And it may take decades for most of us to learn, through relationships that let us see into the emotional lives of others year after year, that indeed this feeling is simply a part of being human.

 
There’s an odd-seeming but very common dynamic at issue here – the feeling of being an outsider, the only lonely person in a crowd that seems connected and happy, the one person not truly a member of the club. Some of the best teachers I’ve known are particularly good at recognizing when students feel too much like outsiders, and they often share an interesting remedy. Instead of the too-simple urge to say, in some way or another, “you’re wrong” – you are popular, or as popular as someone can get; you are as much of an insider as just about everyone else, even if you don’t feel it – these great teachers share a different message: I’m an outsider too, because we all are.

 
The poet Emily Dickinson catches the emotional note here perfectly in one of her best-known poems, celebrating the nobody-ness of being an outsider in a direct appeal to the reader’s lonely heart:

 
I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!

 

 Some teachers understand what this poem reveals about the student who stands on the outside of the circle.. And the best teachers remember that we are all outsiders in some ways, even people who seem to be insiders.

 

My first college teaching job put me inside a very fancy institution, and while some people might have assumed that I belonged there, I never felt it. It was only with the help of others who were clearly outsiders that I held on long enough to feel successful in that job. One of those outsiders was a man named Pat Hoy, recently retired as a colonel, and an English professor, at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Harvard drove him crazy – and me, too, though for different reasons. I was lucky to find that Pat was one of my supervisors. He was my boss, and my teacher, and he made it clear that my feeling like an outsider was in its way a badge of honor. I was a part of his club, even if not part of the bigger club in Cambridge, Massachusetts. When a teacher can create this feeling, great things can happen.

 
Creating this feeling won’t cure any of us of that basic human loneliness, but it will help us recognize that while we may be lonely, we are not alone. This is kind of decency, or being a good human being first, as a necessary condition to being a great teacher, that Ben Ramos talked about.