Classrooms and lifeworlds: an evolving perspective

Newsletter 11: October 1, 2024

1.

In 1974, I was teaching English at Summerhill Academy in Aberdeen, a comprehensive government school close to a working class housing estate. It was a school with an inspired prophet, R.F. Mackenzie, as its head. It was reading his books that had made me want to teach there.

Some of the students, I quickly discovered, were rough. So rough that the school had created small classes of about 5 or 6 of the most disruptive students, mainly in order to allow some semblance of order in the classes for the rest of the students. One of the wits in the English Department had called these small groups ‘the Clockwork classes’, after the Anthony Burgess novel (later made into a film) called The Clockwork Orange. The name stuck.

Irene was in my Clockwork class. Months into the school year, about the only thing she had ever said to me was ‘Fuck off’.

I’d talked about Irene, often, with two of my English teaching colleagues. John and Margaret and I lived together in the same flat. All of us were English teachers. Each of us had a Clockwork class.

One winter’s day, for reasons I can no longer remember, Irene was the only one of my five Clockwork students to show up.

She stood by the window, looking out at the falling snow. As usual, she had made no eye contact.

I sat silently for a while at a desk, also looking out at the snow. I felt cocooned in the heated classroom. Cut off from the world outside. Perhaps Irene felt it too.

We began, much to my surprise, to chat. I can’t remember now what we talked about. The weather, maybe? Then school perhaps? Without other students to witness the conversation, Irene seemed to relax. It’s possible she talked about her home, her prospects, about how gloomy the future seemed. I had this sense that she was reaching out a little. That she was allowing a relationship to form.

That night I told my two colleagues about the conversation. I was encouraged, even excited.

It snowed heavily that night and some roads were impenetrable the next morning. We three had to walk to school. Being winter in Aberdeen, it was still dark as we set out. There was a moon though, and the walk to school was breathtakingly beautiful. The traffic silent. Moonlight on the snow. Not a breath of wind. Perhaps, as we walked, I talked again about Irene. Perhaps I kept to myself my hopes about how our new relationship might develop.

When we arrived and were inside the school’s foyer, I spotted Irene at the top of the stairs, about to descend. I left my colleagues and began to walk up the stairs, pleasantly conscious that my two colleagues were watching and were about to see the fruits of yesterday’s encounter.

‘Morning Irene,’ I said as we crossed.

‘Fuck off,’ she said. It was possibly the last time Irene deigned to acknowledge my presence.

2.

Fast forward to 2009. I’d been teaching English in a private boys’ school for a couple of years, and for the most part was loving it.

But on this day I walked into my Year 11 class in a rage. I was full of what my father once called ‘Steve’s white hot indignation’. I’d just read a number of written comments by the students that indicated that some of the boys were not taking the course as seriously as I thought it deserved.

So I let fly.

I talked about rigour, discipline, responsibility, attention and standards.

I said how unacceptable I found it that some interpreted openness as vagueness, flexibility as laxness, a relaxed classroom atmosphere as an excuse to goof off.

The boys sat silently during my rant.

That night when I logged onto our class site, I saw that a number of boys had written about our lesson. One boy (I’ll call him Leo) called his post ‘Play the game’. He wrote:

.. in Years 11 and 12, it's barely even about the learning at all ... In most subjects, we learn how to pass the exams ... how to structure an essay, how to deliver a speech the way they want it, etc. School is all about how you play the game these days. It's all about doing what you can to get an A, regardless of what you're learning ... And I guess it does teach you stuff about the real world. Teaches you to try to beat the system, that menial busywork sometimes is what you need to do to do well in life, and, most importantly, no matter how much you hate your job, the best revenge is success. I don't think this is what the people who planned this school system had in mind. I guess those guys at the Board of Studies think that the system as it stands is a genuine attempt to educate kids in the subjects they selected for us. Simply put, they're wrong ... The reason why I am having trouble with this course at times is because I have been trained to think like that. I do what I can to do well in the HSC [assessment] . And I think some others in the class (although they may not know it) think the same way. Blogs aren't marked, so I don't do them; projects require organised creativity as opposed to just knowing shit, and suddenly I'm confused; Dr. Shann asks for dedication to the course but he can't put a date or a number on it, so we just don't try.

And then, having let off steam, Leo added a further thought:

English Extension and Studies of Religion are the only classes that allow us to be creative and have a relaxed teaching style that is more about us becoming educated, reflective, well-rounded individuals (if you've seen 'The History Boys', that is exactly what I'm talking about).

So what I'm saying is, give us a prod every now and then like you did today, because we are trying to untrain ourselves from what we know, or at least I am.

3.

[This section is based on the fictional class invented for the short story A Poetry Lesson.]

The year is 2024.

Jess, bless her heart, has asked me if I’d like to teach the class tomorrow. Just five students, the same five I watched from the back of the room in the English lesson this morning.

Of course I said yes, especially when she said I can do whatever I like.

I want tomorrow’s lesson to be experienced by us all as a kind of emergence of the pleasurably unexpected.

What do I mean by that rather odd phrase: the emergence of the pleasurably unexpected?

My final years as a secondary English teacher were spent in a struggle against the enemy of the emergence of the pleasurably unexpected, a battle against the ubiquity of student outcomes. Every lesson was meant to be a stepping stone along a predetermined path, a path to a known outcome, the teacher’s job being to nudge, cajole, impress, inspire and/or guide the student towards the achievement of said measurable outcome.

I hated it.

Why?

Because increasingly for me the classroom (and perhaps the English classroom especially) was the place where meanings emerged out of the soupy mix created by the conversations between student, teacher and text. These emerging meanings were sometimes brought consciously to the conversations, and sometimes they emerged spontaneously.

What might this look like?

I’ll outline one possible way that tomorrow’s lesson might go. One out of an infinite number of possible ways.

I walk in the door. The five students – Scott, Helen, Jamila, Nathan and Alice - are already there. They know me by sight – I’ve been sitting up the back in Jess’s classes this past week – but my presence ‘out the front’ is something of a surprise.

I begin.

‘Jess has invited me to be your teacher for today, a kind invitation I was very pleased to accept. I  know where I’d like us to start today, but have no idea where it might lead. Something will emerge, though, and I’m fairly confident that whatever it is will be of some interest. But let’s see …

On the whiteboard, as you can see, there is a poem, which I’m going to read. I’d like you to listen to it, without (if you can manage it) worrying about what it means or why I’m introducing it to you.’

I then read ‘God’s Grandeur’, by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

God's Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

If I read the poem well, there is a kind of silence in the room. I hope it would be a kind of reverent silence – it’s such a wonderful poem, and I think I would read it well, read it in a way that conveyed the fact that I find it both moving and remarkable –  but maybe that’s hoping too much!

And what happens then? Something unexpectedly pleasurable emerges, as the six of us listen again to the poem and as I ask the students two questions.

What do you notice?

What do you wonder?

These two questions - what we notice and what we wonder - are key. As soon as they are established as the two fixed starting points, it becomes possible for something to emerge.  The five students are, straight away, given to understand that what happens during this lesson is strongly influenced by what they bring to the encounter. Insights, collaborations, questions, puzzles, confusions, speculations, past experiences – all or most of these will take the lesson somewhere, and perhaps where it takes one of the students will not be where it takes the other four.

Perhaps an implicit lesson will be taught, something to do with the idea that there are no fixed meanings, just (hopefully) thoughtful and grounded encounters.

And why am I so sure that this is the way a lesson would go?

Because nature is never spent.

Because there lives the dearest freshness deep down things.

In classrooms, potentially, as in all things.

4.

I selected these three snapshots of different times in my teaching life because they represent the evolving way I’ve understood classroom realities, and in particular where the life or energy or power is located.

When I began as a teacher, I imagined this life or energy to be found in the teacher-pupil relationship, and with Irene it flickered briefly and was then snuffed out.

By the time I was teaching English in 2009, I was more consciously aware that the energy in the room was being affected by other, societal, factors, such as parental ambitions, assessment procedures, as well of course as the in-the-moment push and pull of the teacher-student relationship, the student-student relationships.

And now? Now I imagine the classroom as a place, like all places, full of what Rilke called ‘rustling resonances’: the conscious and unconscious aspirations of teacher and students; the memories and moods nudged into (often unconscious) life by the weather, the room, the sounds, the previous lesson or day or weekend or year; the timbre and energy of the voices (teachers and students); the energy contained in – and associations released by – the poem or story or whatever the ‘content’ may be; the silences; the quality of the various voices. It is a world, partly comprehensible, partly mysterious. It’s a world best described by writers like Spinoza, Deleuze, Massey and Stewart, none of whom talked explicitly about classrooms. It’s this that I’ve tried to convey in Section 3 above.

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The painting at the head of this post is by Solomon Karmel-Shann. Its subject is the artist G.W. Bot.

I choose these paintings for my Newsletters not because they illustrate what I’m writing about (though occasionally they happen to), but because I like having my son’s marvellous paintings scattered around the home page of my site.

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