Teaching Without Knowing

Teaching young people is interesting because it makes me realize that there is not too much in life that I can plan. Kids can really be the best teachers because we don’t know what their moods are going to be from one day to the next, or whether they are truly up to ‘learning’ whatever it is that I plan for them to learn. It is also a lesson in humility, because even though I might rehearse in my mind what I expect to happen, it never quite turns out that way that I planned. I even have moments, especially with Grade 4s who are much older than primary school students, that my plans are quite trivial compared to what really happens in the classroom. Often, what I really feel is going to be a ‘hit’ with students can turn out to be something that doesn’t resonate with them at all, or it turns out that the process is not as smooth as I imagine.

I think that the whole point of this process is that I am learning to at least try to be more secure in situations where there is not much that I can cling to in my imagination. To do this requires a kind of trust which I think it akin to the ‘living classroom’, a term coined by the educator Christopher Bache. The  idea of the living classroom is a bit tricky, but it’s a notion that teachers are not the originators of learning, but are rather carried by a kind of group energy that originates in the classroom dynamic itself. In order to sustain that energy, teachers need to be both planful (if there is such a word) and open to what that present moment truly needs. Of course, trying to gauge what the present moment needs is not easy and does not often seem possible considering all of one’s anxieties and wandering thoughts. But I think the idea is that one uses one’s plans not as a fixed template but as a way to engage in a totality that is always moving by mysterious conditions. The teacher’s role is one of only many that are integral to the processes of learning, and knowing this, the teacher sees herself in a different way from the traditional ‘classroom leader’. It is more like giving breathing space for learning in the room to arise in a much more organic way than imagined.

This also seems to mean allowing moments when things don’t seem to work. In times like that, it seems like my humanity really shows, especially my tendency to despair when things aren’t working as I imagine they could or should. But instead of rejecting that ‘humanity’, I might just decide to show it a bit, and even take risks to change the course of the daily plan for the class. After all, this is what humans do: plan, then break plans, then make new ones. And one needn’t have a license to do so!