Too-muchness, discouragement and the lifting of horizons
Newsletter 15: December 20, 2024
Last week, while sifting through a pile of old writings, I came across the following unfinished piece – something I wrote for myself about 20 years ago, during an angst-filled week while teaching at a private boys’ school.
1.
‘Keep your horizons up,’ a senior colleague encouragingly said to me recently in response to something I’d written, a piece where I’d attempted to look beyond the day-to-day to what might be possible.
Looking at the horizon ... being able to see the vision. This has always been vital for me. When I can’t see the bigger view, I get weighed down, discouraged, saggy. And right now the accumulated weight of tasks-to-be-immediately-attended-to has meant that I haven’t glimpsed a horizon – high or low – in weeks.
Today I’ve taken a day off.
Everywhere I look in my study here at home – on the carpet, on the desk, and in my cluttered mind – there are jobs to do. Three assessment tasks to mark. At least three separate pieces of work from my Year 9 English class that have been sitting there while I've been writing reports. Two different pieces from my Year 9 RAVE (Religion and Values Education) class. There are about six novels or plays I need to read for next term (and I’ve lost my Shared Literature book ... it’s got to be here somewhere, but I’m damned if I can find it), and my Year 9 English class is full of distressing turmoil.
I’m full of distressing turmoil!
This morning I tried to sleep (I have a headache and a sore throat, and my wife says I’m a peculiar colour at the moment), but could only toss and turn as I thought about this steadily accumulating pile of things-to-do. Finally I gave in to the restlessness and came into my study to write.
I want to write my way out of this state. Someone more practical would say that the way forward would be to mark some of the work that’s sitting on the carpet. I could mark the work … and then sift through boys’ creative writing for the end of year publication … and then plan my lessons for tomorrow ... and then think what I'm going to say to the Head of English when she sees the state of some of the boys’ folders ... and then start to plan next term so I’m not in such a continual state of coping with tomorrow ... and then start to read some of the six or so novels or plays I have to read before the new term begins. I could do all of that, but my horizons wouldn’t be any the higher. I need to think through what I’m experiencing at the moment. I need to try to grapple with its nature, to see its meaning from some less-constricted perspective (correct in its own way, but limiting) than the one dominating and agitating my consciousness at the moment.
It’s not easy to write about these feelings of too-muchness, of being swamped, of being hemmed in, of having the horizons blotted out. It feels too complex, beyond words in ways that I’ve often experienced in the past. As Nietzsche said with typical lunatic clarity:
Our actual experiences are not in the least talkative. They could not express themselves even if they wanted to. For they lack the words to do so. When we have words for something we have already gone beyond it ... The speaker vulgarises himself as soon as he speaks. Nietzsche Twilight of the Idols IX 26
At the risk of vulgarising myself, I want to try.
2.
As I was walking to my double lesson of second top set Year 9 English on Monday of last week, one of my students Robert asked me what I had planned.
‘Oh, about nine different activities,’ I said lightly.
Robert is always complaining that what I set makes impossible demands. And it was true that I had a list with nine activities on it (though some would take just a minute or two to complete). I’d thought hard about this lesson, and spent some hours the night before trying to tidy up the many loose ends from Second Term by making a check list to help the students finish off the nine tasks that needed to be attended to.
One of these was to look at and comment on an outline I’d done of how we might approach the Third Term syllabus. I was pleased with this plan and was looking forward to talking about it with the class. I felt I’d struck the right kind of balance in it between giving the boys a secure and solid sense of direction on the one hand, and giving them the time and flexibility to explore stimulating material on the other. I could imagine Robert, for example, thriving if he were to commit himself to this plan, and I imagined that by introducing it now, before the end of term, it would help the students to come back in a positive and energetic frame of mind.
‘Nine activities!’ said Robert, and I noticed that this time there was genuine distress in his voice and on his face. ‘You never give up, do you! You don’t understand what it’s like, how ridiculous the demands you make on us are! I hate coming to English these days. I just hate it.’
Robert always complains at the beginning of any unit, and then almost always works his way through the complaints to a productive and successful piece of work. He and I have joked about this, and I reminded him of this now.
‘It’s not funny,’ he insisted. ‘I keep wishing there was no English, I dread coming to class. It’s just too much.’
We walked together in silence to the classroom. I was unsettled but not discouraged. I felt sure that when he and the others saw my plan they’d see its many advantages. But Robert went straight to his friends, mumbling loudly about what I was about to impose.
I’ve learnt with this class that taking a positive lead from the very start of the lesson is vital, that otherwise the atmosphere degenerates into a kind of dispirited and unfocussed wasting of time. So, as positively as my unmilitary voice would allow me, I gave out the sheets I’d prepared with both the nine tasks for this lesson listed and the plans for Third Term outlined.
I was a minute into explaining the list when three boys arrived late from Chapel, two minutes later someone came in from a music lesson, and three more times a latecomer interrupted the flow. My mounting frustration was obvious, and was proving more the focus of attention for some of the boys than the plans I was desperate to lay out before them.
I pressed on.
‘You’ll notice that the term’s program is made up of four elements,’ I said. ‘Reading, language, the Shakespeare and the film study that we’ve been talking about all year ...’
‘There’s too much here,’ said one boy immediately, before (I felt sure) he had had a chance to read the whole proposal. Indeed there was a general scowl on the faces of the boys around Robert, and one said that by writing up the whole term’s work like this I was filling the class with a feeling of heaviness.
‘Just let me explain the proposal before you let your critical faculties kick in,’ I said, and then immediately saw the frowns on the faces of the boys who complain that I speak in riddles, that I cannot say a simple thing simply. ‘Understand the proposal first, then once you’ve understood it I want to hear your thoughts about it. But don’t jump to conclusions about whether it’s a good or bad plan until you’ve listened to me explain it.’ More blank looks.
‘You mean we have to do two assignments every cycle? That's impossible!’
‘No, that’s not what I mean or what it says! I’ll get to that bit in a minute ...’
‘You’re asking us to read a novel during the holidays,’ said a second boy. ‘And I thought I might actually have a life during our time off ...’
I couldn’t believe this! What was so bloody threatening about a proposal? Why this unproductive and undermining rush to judgement?
I insisted they listen, and there was a surly silence as I continued to go through the plan for Term 3. When I’d finished, I returned to the nine tasks for this week.
Compare Terms 1 and 2
Finish preparing for the English Rules test
Do the Eng Rules test & hand in
Submit some creative writing for school magazine.
Talk to SCS (me) about Term 3 draft
Collect profile sheet from SCS and fill in
Prepare English folder for inspection and hand in
Collect Hard Times and begin reading
Watch Black Adder (Thursday)
‘We’re going to begin with the writing,’ I said. ‘I want you to think about the difference between first and second term ...’
‘Are you saying that we can do the test at any time?’ said Chris. ‘It’s going to be easy to cheat ...’
Oh these familiar assumptions about learning, about what we’re trying to do together in this classroom. ‘Of course you can cheat!’ I said. ‘And who benefits from that?’
‘I would,’ said one of the students. ‘I’d get better marks.’
I hate this schoolboy mindset! I was on the edge of diving into one of my customary rants about what education’s all about, about how the obsession with marks is a distraction from learning. But I didn’t. There was a genuine desire to do well in the class and that meant getting good marks, and I could hardly blame the students for that.
But I could also see that some of the students’ comments were designed to goad me into some kind of histrionic and entertaining rant. I remembered how much, as a rather anxious and frustrated school boy, I used to enjoy these kinds of spectacle.
‘Let’s focus our minds for a minutes on the comparison between ...’
‘Are we watching Black Adder today?’ asked a hitherto silent student.
‘The folder inspection,’ asked another. ‘Is that to evaluate our performances this year, or yours?’
I smiled and pointed to myself. But the smile was not a natural one. I was struggling to hold onto this lesson. And onto my temper. There was another interjection and I lost it.
‘Some of you are under the odd impression that I spent some hours yesterday doing this list and plan for my own benefit!’ I said, conscious mainly of how frustratingly often in my teaching career I’ve been reduced to this kind of outburst. ‘Some of you imagine that what I’m trying to do here is make your lives miserable and burdened, when in fact what I’m attempting, obviously unsuccessfully, is to make things more manageable, and to give us a way of making plans together about what we’re going to do. I want to hear your views. It’s important that I listen to what you’ve got to say about things, and that I think about them. And I’ve built in opportunities for exactly this kind of feedback into the checklist. I want to hear what each of you has to say about Third Term. But not now. Now I want you to write. I want you to write about the difference between first and second terms. They were different terms. The material was different, and the way we approached it was different. You made comments to me at the end of first term about the work load, and about the way I was teaching, and I listened to those comments and made some adjustments. I want to know what the experience of the two different terms was like for you, and I want you to write it now, silently, for the next twenty minutes. On the paper that I’ve given out. Start now!’
I felt drained, as I always did when I found myself haranguing the class like this. I know that something is wrong when I find myself doing it. And I was enjoying the sullen turning of attention towards the blank page in this lesson. But at least they were focussed. At least something that might be productive was happening.
I realised that I’d left something in the staff room, and as the class was now writing silently I left the classroom to get it.
‘Are you all right?’ said a colleague when I got there. Another looked up from her desk, concern on her face. I felt suddenly self-conscious.
‘As right as anyone can be in the middle of a double with Year 9,’ I said, trying to sound on top of things.
But as I walked back to the classroom, I suddenly realised that I felt sick. Not just physically sick (though that as well). I felt that terrible feeling of being in the midst of a disintegrating order, that sick feeling of having diminishing supplies of energy, willpower, resources, intelligence, to prevent the situation from becoming chaotic. There’s the line from Tennyson about the centre not holding.
I struggled through the rest of the double lesson.
The boys handed in their writing. Mathew gave me some writing for the school magazine. I talked with others about their learning styles. All the time I called out to those who were becoming unfocussed again, and for the rest of the lesson felt like my seven-year-old son trying to catch fish in his hands in a rock pool. It just doesn’t work.
I was mightily relieved when the bell rang, but then lost it again in a Year 7 RAVE class where I called a boy a ‘smart-arse’.
I left for home feeling sick and discouraged.
3.
I feel in the grip of a compulsion to teach this Year 9 English class particularly well, partly because the Department Head has let me know that I’m on some kind of trial as a teacher of top sets. I want to see myself as an intelligent teacher of intelligent boys.
But that’s not the only reason why I feel driven with this particular class. I love the material – the novels, the opportunities to think and write, the poetry – and feel myself to be on some kind of crusade to bring quality literature into the experience of these struggling adolescent boys. Struggling? I say ‘struggling’ because they’re Year 9s, too grown up to soak up what I say or willingly enter into the spirit of what I suggest, but too young to see that their carpings and scattinesses creates the very unsatisfactoriness about which they complain. ‘I wish I didn’t have to do English at all,’ said Robert in his writing. ‘This term has made English undesirable.’ The expression is awkward but the sentiment clear. And I feel driven to turn it all around, to make English desirable again.
4.
When I got home, I read through the writing the boys had done during the double lesson.
Term One was too rushed [wrote one]. This term I could do assignments deeply and thoughtfully and I felt in second term that I was really learning things, especially in the war poetry.
Term One was a struggle with the workload [wrote another] but I seemed to have enjoyed myself more. After Term One I felt like I had conquered a mountain of work, but in Term Two I felt as though I was walking along a desolate plain. It was easy going but there was no point to the bushwalk. From my point of view this last term has been slow and boring and easy.
I put more effort into Term One [wrote a third]. I work a lot better when I’m under pressure. It is like the scientific collision theory: the higher the pressure, the more particles collide: thus more reactions ... I’m quite happy cruising until exams when I’m under pressure.
Terms One and Two were quite different, for a number of reasons. I deliberately took the pressure off in second term, partly because boys in the class convincingly complained that they had no time to think about the work. They were doing it (as one boy put it) ‘like you do pages of sums, mechanically, as quickly and as mindlessly as you can’. And as a result of the changes I made, Will and Julian and Ed and Josh and Noah and James and David and Richard and Alex and Tim all thought more. They wrote better. They did more. They liked the literature more. But Sam (who wrote about the collision theory) and Stewart and Tom and Brewin and Michael and Matthew (who wrote about Term 2 being like a desolate plain) all felt they had a less productive term.
Some like it when we do more ordered and structured language work (and write about how they feel they are at last learning something) and others are insulted by it and can’t wait for us to start the Shakespeare. Some ask me to teach them more, to be clearer about my expectations, and when I try to do this they (or perhaps it’s the others?) complain, undermine, trivialise or switch off!
If I treat them as adults (and give them choices and room to move) some take the easy way out, goof off, take the micky. If I treat them like children, they complain in ways that make me ashamed of my petty-mindedness. I know enough about human nature (partly from my experience as a therapist) to realise that my feelings in situations like this one are not simply the result of my own neuroticisms, that to some extent (by being open) I am allowing them to put some of their insecurities into me. It’s what I do with these insecurities that I’m angsting about, that I’m wanting to write about in some kind of productive way.
5.
I’ve just realised, as I’ve been writing, that there is a legacy from first term which makes me feel queasy and is hovering like a shadow over all of this, contributing to my agitations. At the Year 9 parent evening at the end of first term, a furious mother complained that I had unjustly and ignorantly penalised her son for not handing in work on time when he’d made every effort to do so, that I’d refused to listen to him, that while every other teacher saw what a good student he was, I had a distorted view of him and the boy’s time in my class had been deeply distressing. She followed this up (at my suggestion) with a meeting between me and the tutor, the parents and the boy, at which she again spoke angrily and coldly. I left the meeting pretty shaky, but tried not to take things too personally or react too defensively. The boy and I, and then the tutor and I, talked afterwards about the way forward. It was partly as a result of some of the things this boy said that I adjusted my approach in second term.
Things seemed to have gone reasonably well since then, but during the double lesson the boy (who is usually polite and friendly) was surly and restless. Afterwards I read what he had written about the comparison between first and second terms.
I believe term 2 was just as hard as term 1, if not harder. One major problem that I have found was that you wanted us to explore our ideas and use them in our writing. I found when I did this you said that you preferred it if I did it another way. Term 1 comprised a short story unit and For Whom the Bell Tolls. I found the first unit really fun but I think because I didn’t like For Whom the Bell Tolls I didn’t enjoy the unit. There was a lot of speculation about homework and the fact that there was a lot, which I believed there was. Term 2 settled down a bit but I enjoyed it more. Not as much prep but there was still a bit. I really enjoyed the book (All Quiet on the Western Front) but not the poetry. All in all, I thought the unit was good.
I do not understand what is being expressed here. I worry about this level of inarticulateness. I fear another bolt from the blue.
6.
There is nothing at all new about any of this, I know. This is what teaching is like, and in particular what teaching a Year 9 class is like. The students are all different from each other, and each of them is different one day to how he was the day before.
And I’ve always struggled with this. My idealistic self wants the English classes to be a buzz for all the students all the time. My idealistic self wants to forge a marriage between great literature and young minds (in the way that one of my own teachers did for me). My adult self wants to provide some kind of secure ballast for minds that are all at sea in the turbulence of adolescence.
Colleagues help when they remind me about the nature of the Year 9 boy.
But still I struggle. I try to listen to the students’ points of view and to adapt, but some say I listen without changing anything and others say I change too much. I try to be clear about requirements and expectations and feel repeatedly unheard or blocked out. To what extent is this my own lack of clarity (the shadow side of my own complexity)? To what extent is this an expression of the boys’ own turbulence? Do I respond to all of this by being more flexible or less?
How should I be?
This morning, trying to lift horizons, I read about courage in Day by Day – Reflections on the Themes of the Torah from Literature, Philosophy and Religious Thoughts. Two quotations in particular spoke to my present state.
Shall we strike sail [wrote Thomas Mann], avoid a certain experience as soon as it seems not expressly calculated to increase our enjoyment or our self-esteem? Shall we go away whenever life looks like turning in the slightest uncanny, or not quite normal, or even rather painful and mortifying? No, surely not. Rather stay and look matters in the face, brave them out; perhaps precisely in so doing lies a lesson for us to learn.
And from Marcus Aurelius:
Will ... what has happened prevent you from being just, magnanimous, temperate, prudent, secure against inconsiderate opinions and falsehood; will it prevent you from having modesty, freedom, and everything else, by the presence of which man's nature obtains all that is its own?
Clearly I need to continue to try to be myself, to teach in a way that feels authentic to the kind of person I am. Indeed I need to be more explicit about this, I need to be clearer to the boys about the kind of teacher I am and about what it is that I value. This was made clear by what one boy wrote, comparing my teaching to that of his last English teacher:
Dr Shann, I’ve found, has not explained really what he wants in his work CLEARLY ... It’s not the level of expectancy needed, because I’ve been in top set before, but just the sudden change of what different teachers require or what they think are the main issues in the work. I enjoyed the ability to clearly express my writing in my other class, but in Dr Shann’s, it bothers me to decipher whether to do parts of the work expressively or logically in order to attain a good mark ... In short I need clear, well-developed instructions ... to develop and express my own work well.
Having said that I need to be clearer, though, I recall the number of times I’ve tried to be clear and have not been heard. Maybe (though this would be the subject of another piece of writing), it’s not possible to be concise and clear about expectations that are actually personal, shifting, individually tailored to particular boys, and complex.
7.
And there’s actually a more immediate issue that I need to sort out, connected to this business of how I can be both effective and authentic. In my plan, the first novel in our reading for next term is Hard Times, and I’ve suggested that it be read during the holidays. I love the novel, but have a bad feeling about setting it for this class. I can hear my badgering voice telling the students how relevant it is, I can visualise my creative mind thinking up all sorts of ways to connect its themes to complaints they’ve made – for example about the way I smother them with work (Facts) and leave little room for the play of imagination (Fancy). But I have this leaden sense that my attempts will fail, that they’ll say the language is weird and the characters unreal, that they couldn’t get into it, and, as a result of all this, the new term will start on a downer. Do I persist, because I love Dickens and it’s a great book and here is an opportunity for them to have something potentially deepening and exciting introduced to them? (With For Whom the Bell Tolls I worked very hard … was it enough that perhaps two or three of the boys will never forget the experience of reading it, will want as a result to read more Hemingway?) Or do I listen to my more pragmatic voice which says that a different novel would be a much better start to a more sustained reading experience?
_________________________________________________
All of the above was written, as I say, around 20 years ago.
I remember one of my colleagues at the time saying to me: ‘Steve, there are thinkers and there are doers. You are a thinker and it seems to get you tied up in knots. Most of us are doers, and we get on with things the way they are and that works pretty well.’
The irony is not lost on me that I continue, more than 20 years later, to think a lot about what he said that day.
‘There are thinkers and there are doers.’ Do you agree with this? If so, which category would you put yourself into?