The more I think about the design and sequencing of academic lessons, the more I believe warm ups are a waste.

The vital thing is to begin with a lesson’s most important point.

Teachers rarely if ever discuss sequencing; I don’t know why. Along with the pacing of a course, how best to order within a lesson is a question that never fades but rather shapes instruction, forever.

A warm-up is another waiting room. A warm-up is the tone-deaf line at the start of a predictable poem. It’s a stale appetizer, a dead battery, bad breath.

Warm-ups in academics were probably borrowed from athletics, where the body requires limbering, and from the concept of a hook in writing. They came from the 1970s and ’80s when constructivists realized they needed to arouse interest or activate prior knowledge before delivering a lecture.

Yes, it makes sense to have students work on something essential and meaningful right when they walk in the room.

I tend to let Do Now’s last beyond any relevant “Now” and then mistakenly follow them with even more mundane housekeeping announcements better pushed to the middle (see below).

The problem is described by an old, well researched concept—serial positioning effect. Students mostly learn and retain what is sequenced first and last in a lesson. Serial positioning effect then is broken down into primacy and recency effects, respectively.

If, as in a poem or newspaper writing, the first element is the essential one, why start with busywork, even if it leads toward the day’s goal?

One of the exercises at Stanford Design School’s Teaching and Learning Lab I attended two weeks ago was to label the parts of a lesson with design concepts—Orientation, Exploration, Explanation, and Reflection—and then arrange them into a sequence. It struck me that educators default to a sequence embalmed in templates from new teacher preparation:

_{1) a warm-up or anticipation set;}

_{2) a lesson or lecture;}

_{3) individual or group practice;}

_{4) assessment.}

The problem with this hand-me-down recipe is the meat’s in the middle and thus, according to serial positioning effects, indigestible.

In reality, the sequence of a lesson can follow any number of possibilities, and varying lesson starters might in itself aid retention since the mind clings to novelty. If what comes first really does count more than what comes at the end, then the key choice in lesson planning is how to choose the first item. When I wrote for newspapers, I knew that once I had a good lede sentence, the rest of the article would snap into place.

And just as a good modern novelist starts with action or conflict, a teacher can jump right into any of the following:

1. Start with a model, an exemplar, and analyze it together. This is my go-to lesson opener because my primary goal, almost always, is to turn students into practitioners, and an exemplar visually demonstrates what quality looks like. Learning styles may have been debunked, but if most students can see what they’re supposed to do, they are far more likely to be able to begin their own good work. And almost any student in the room can notice something in the model. Unless a standards-based rubric is forced upon me, I will turn the chart paper of features we have analyzed into a collectively generated scoring guide. After that, students can begin.

2. Reflection first: Serial positioning effect must be balanced with psychological safety. If a lesson is going to bring up material that challenges the personal experiences, identities, self-concepts, or long-held values of anyone in the room, it is wise to begin with reflection. In a school day dominated by extroverted talk and group work, to begin with quiet writing can be a gift, particularly to anchor the start, midpoint, or end of a unit or course. For teachers of writing like me, reflection might also accord with primacy effect: there might be nothing more essential than to get kids actually writing.

3. Exploration first: If students have already comprehended the what or how of a unit, they could jump right into a lesson with a lab, shared research, making and creating, problem sets, an ongoing project. The Stanford d.school’s philosophy is that learning happens by doing though my favorite parts of the week were lecturettes by their faculty of passionate practitioners. Mostly, I agree: it takes a lot of actual writing to become a good writer.

   A problem in starting with exploration is when students don’t know how to do the practice. The result then is frustration and diminished confidence. Before I begin to encourage students to “just write,” I find I have to unpack the baggage they have accumulated from previous English teachers. First, I have to show them that they do possess their own voice, their ideas and noticings matter, and I am not going to shred their work for errors.

   Another danger starting with exploration is that what can get retained is actually bad practice. A great coach I worked with, Peter Shaifer, used to say, “Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.” In other words, practicing incorrect technique leads to developing muscle memory of bad technique. This matters in the classroom when correct skill execution actually matters.

4. Discussion first: teaching texts, I don’t want students to play “Guess What the Teacher Already Knows”. Starting class immediately with a discussion after having read a text for homework is best when I want to privilege students’ noticings and connections—and then I want them to spiral deeper with those of others, not mine. The truth is, I might have students underline three key quotes before we begin since we all need to tee up what we want to say.

5. Lecture or minilesson first—yes, really. And sometimes students appreciate entering, sitting down, and just taking notes. School and life are demanding enough. Tell me what I don’t know. Tell me what you want me to be able to do. The transaction is simple, clear, classic–and admittedly passive. When the goal is content transfer—or demonstrating a skill as yet unknown—it is fair and good for the teacher just to, well, teach. Radical fact: it is possible for students in 2026 to say, “My teacher doesn’t actually teach.” Sometimes we are so sensitive to the power dynamic educators hold over learners that we leap to the far-side error and shy from instructing what or how to do anything. I am critiquing the culture in some schools (not mine); I am not criticizing educators who tend to get enough grief.

   In support of the centrality of teachers: when I had a class with a master of their craft, I wanted to hear more of how they think, what their tacit knowledge and inner landscape look like, learn from their stories and hardwon gleanings. I always bring up my grad-school mentor, the writer Carol Bly, for she could teach more in one ninety-minute session than I would have figured out in thirty years of exploring writing on my own. Carol Bly was in The New Yorker, published scores of books, was a writing pal with e.e. cummings and Wendell Berry and William Stafford, so why the heck would I want to start class by sharing ignorance with the learner sitting next to me? Not every teacher is Carol Bly. In general, the best learning results from a mix of instruction and practice with feedback. Still, when an introduction to a new skill or concept is the most important takeaway from a lesson, the first thing is to say and show it.

6. Quiz first—then correct it together, reteach it, practice more, answer questions, and retake the quiz. This could really work for some classes and students. Starting in the first minute with a quiz definitely sets an air of seriousness. A young content-area teacher could rely on worse. Inadvertently, this method could play into perfectionism or, conversely, remind struggling students of their failure. What is intended to feel low stakes could end up feeling high stakes–precisely due to primacy effect. Anyone would feel sour and remember it if they scored low at the beginning and the close of a single class period!

7. HW review or share-out first: This makes sense and is common practice but as I write, it appears more vapid than beginning a lesson with a warm-up.

8. Sharing resources first: I did not get this initially, but an elementary-school STEM teacher at the Stanford workshop helped me understand its brilliance in his context: he starts lessons showing students what they can build or play with for the rest of class. It reminds me of Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman, the ideal of a shop of practitioners beginning the day by taking out their tools. Another imagination is the staff of a Michelin-starred restaurant gathering before first service to go over the menu du jour and matching vintages. A lesson in a research-focused unit or course, like a visit to the librarian, likewise begins with a fanning out of worthy sources.

9. Begin with a critique of what’s to come. This sounds like a trigger warning, and it could be. I have been told that the best way to learn a system is to critique its causes and effects. When senior speechwriters come to me for help to put a challenging or wild idea to paper, I usually advise them to write an “intro preparatory” to tell the audience what’s coming up, so they can reframe. Criticism can build intrigue and set some difficulties aside, up front.

10. Begin (or end) with meditation; mindfulness practice; yoga; a five-minute nap; jumping jacks or a sprint to the old rock. At first glance a reaction against serial order effect, this actually sets the real start of class later, after the rest period. Depending on what’s going on in the day, students then will be readier to receive the lesson. We’ve all been here: lose five minutes, or lose the whole lesson? Sometimes what’s most important and therefore first (or last) is to be centered, calm, better rested, happy, and cared for by an educator able to see beyond his subject.

Notice that attendance has not been mentioned. A group of Brown University theater majors used to travel to public high schools and correctively enacted what they saw as problem scenes in education, akin to Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed; the scene that still makes me laugh was where a teacher announced to her class, “We have a very exciting lesson today, and now I’m going to take attendance!” An argument could be made that the most important fact of a lesson is that students actually attend. However, attendance might disrupt a lesson’s “primacy time” less if, say, students could scan a QR code near the door when they arrive.

What goes in the middle of a lesson, then? Those items that used to dawdle at the beginning but are irrelevant to mastery: housekeeping, the review of HW and instructions for tomorrow’s HW, mini-practices broken up by quick critiques like a good coach: “I like what I’m seeing on the whole but would add that I’m not seeing enough xyz,” followed by another short practice. Just as the best line of a poem should not get buried in the middle of a stanza, the big So-What of a lesson should not get lost in the middle of a class.

What, then, goes at the end (recency effect)? My answer is that many good poems circle back to their beginning or even the title.

The key metaphor for sequencing: learning is like a man who loses his keys at night and has to go looking between streetlights1.

Teachers see how the parts of a lesson connect, yet we overlook what for students are unilluminated gaps between activities. It cannot be overstated how difficult it is for a novice to see a subject’s coherence.

The corrective I have been offering is to start beneath the first lamp. There, just drop the keys.

“We are always poeming.” These were the words of my mentor, Felicia Zamora, at Orion Magazine’s 2025 Environmental Writers’ Workshop. To poem is to inhabit a particular mode of noticing. She described it as a deep dive into a microscene which connects to other microscenes and then to a larger field of ideation.

Two dark squirrels in the eucalyptus trees above me. Two tall poles carved by men from the Sepik River area with birds of prey atop the heads of human faces. Two people put into pairs in two rotating circles. It’s a full moon day and I am listening to wisdom all around me. This is the kind of noticing I do in poem-mind. It’s intimate. It’s soulful and deeply personal.

I came to poetry by way of ethnographic writing, in which I tended to notice in a way adjacent to what I do in poem-mind. I learned in ethnographic writing to zoom in to details of embodied knowledge and to zoom out to fields of culture, power, and experience.

And this week, I’m at Stanford University’s d.school where I’m immersed in yet another way of noticing, one that is meant to serve design thinking. Here, noticing is a design ability, a skill that is key to design thinking.

Ethnography, poetry, and design thinking require particular and different modes of noticing. They value noticing differently, even though all require vulnerability and their own sorts of relationality and responsibility. I am wondering about the cross-domain pollination that I might find in these ways of noticing.

In workshop with Zamora, I cried when she asked: “Why do you poem?” I thought of how I can say anything to a blank page and it’s safe. I can take up space, make bold conceptual leaps, contemplate, be weird, and the page holds me. When I enter poem-mind, I call upon noticings that make a field of sense to me. I notice as contemplative devotion, as self-interrogation, as a human woman trying to be in right relation. Poem-mind is one means to become and voice myself. I poem to express how I find the “world in a grain of sand” and a grain of sand in this vast world. This one scratchy grain of sand, that I’m feeling on the skin of my calf right now as I sit in the Papua New Guinea garden on the campus grounds.

Noticing is shaped my by culturally informed eyes and lenses--as in other modes of noticing, but here it’s a mode of voicing I understand as unique to me.

Design-mind asks me to notice quickly with this frame of inquiry at the forefront: “How might we….?” As in “How might we change this into a different experience?” or “How might we identify a problem someone is facing?” The danger is that this noticing could take the form of extraction or exploitation of others’ behaviors or thoughts. Maggie Gram discusses this as a “dilution” of ethnographic research where design thinking ends up serving the interests of creative problem-solving and often capitalist utopian projects where people are only data.

Here, noticing of self and others is meant to generate wild ideas in teams where “Yes, lets! … and” speed toward experimentation and prototyping. It doesn’t feel as safe to me because I think witnessing takes time.

As Leslie Jamison explains of empathy, it takes thoughtful curiosity and intentional imagination cultivated with care and practice. Noticing in design-mind doesn’t always do this. Yet this week I’ve felt the playfulness and assertiveness of design-mind as an invitation to notice where my biases, tendencies, and habits hold me back from possibility. 

In ethnography, noticing unfolds in an evolutionary thinking, in a refinement of inquiry and conceptual maps. User tests of prototypes aren’t really what’s happening, so the noticing is directed more toward collaboration and inclusion across an initial difference. As an ethnographer, the witnessing and participation I engaged during research was full of failure, humility, complexity, and childlike learning. Ethnographers aim to mentally and emotionally network into the concept maps of different groups and communities. Doing so requires intense self-reflection and critical analysis. Noticing here is less about “how might we,” and more about “how is what’s happening valuable, or contested, and why.”

Ethnographic-mind feels to me more like an emergent, cooperative project of noticing together around particular questions of justice and equity which arise through extended periods of intense immersion.

"Still, in a way, nobody sees a flower — really — it is so small — we haven't time — and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time." Georgia O’Keeffe’s words harken a field of noticings, each one a color of its own and I’m walking through learning how they know each other.

I started yoga after my divorce and discovered that taking up yoga after divorce is a thing. Like writing, it heals through purgation.

The wish to teach yoga came in part from wanting to share the benefits I’d found. And my decision to pursue certification was strategic, too, since the best learning is in teaching. If I stayed a student of yoga, I would remain a student.

Conversely, the benefit for an experienced teacher to switch domains is to recall what it feels like to be a learner. Besides, I prefer to devote myself to deep wells, subjects you can study a lifetime and forever go deeper. The yoga studio calls me to re-examine the assumptions, methods, and purposes I bring to academics.

With the new school year near, I want to cross-fertilize between all of my teaching and coaching spaces with moves such as these:

The Check In: Many yoga teachers check in with students before class starts to ask about limitations, needs, or to say hi. I like the warmth and intention to differentiate. At this point, standing at the schoolroom door before class makes me feel more awkward or protective than welcoming, a bouncer more than a shaman who’s opening a transformative portal.

What I plan to attempt this coming school year is to get my stuff ready as students enter class and then roll around during the warm-up activity to give weight to homework but also to play the yoga teacher, asking, “What are you needing? Anything I should know about?” Getting away from my screen or board, my vision will discern more than students are likely to admit, and it will feel humanizing, I hope.

Teaching with the eyes: New yoga teachers obsess over verbal cues, but once those become somewhat automatic, I notice that masters teach as much with their eyes. They laser-look at what each individual in the room is doing and which instructions are most needed. They identify stuck spots, where one side is favored, foundational roots underlying a lack of reach.

I am trying to leapfrog the beginning-yoga-instructor stage by taking notes and borrowing veterans’ prompts, so I can focus more on setting my head atop a swivel. When I am doing my best as a writing instructor, I glimpse as much work as energy or time allows during class to give on-the-spot feedback and later speed up my grading. But I want to get outside my spiel to sense the room and work better to tailor my instruction, crisper, quicker, more flexibly. Demo what to do, so they can see it, but then get up, circulate, adjust, differentiate, urge, encourage. Don’t get stuck up front.

Flexible classes that unfold: Most Iyengar yoga teachers in the States don’t follow set sequences. They might walk into a session with a couple starters, an apex pose, or a theme in mind. But they vary the sequence based on the students who appear. If there is a planned-for apex pose—the posture all of the others are leading toward—they build toward it depending on students’ limitations and experience levels. The apex pose is unfolded, gradually, and there can be an epiphany when students see how all of the preparatory movements converge.

Admittedly, there is a risk of boring school students with too long a warm up or breakdown of components—too much practice when we should just do the darned thing. I admit I’m prone to the overlong lead-up.

Even so, a worse risk is that students leave the room not knowing what to do or how the teacher got there. It is easy for an experienced teacher, even a master, to rush the lesson since they already see the linkages and get where it’s all going.

Simply to assign and assess is the pitfall when too much content is squeezed into a curricular unit, but then when does the teaching occur?

If a concept or skill is worth teaching, it is worth an expansion of time to unfold parts as well as its essence, sometimes by assuming seemingly different “poses” that contain something similar at the core, so when the genuine challenge of an apex is introduced, everyone has done the preparatory steps. There’s a taste of mastery in a day.

Comfort and vibes matter: Why are classrooms beyond the elementary grades designed—or, more likely, undesigned—to look like waiting rooms? School then becomes a series of waiting rooms. A yoga studio looks like a place where you do yoga, sanctuaries you want to revisit. English classrooms should appear a place where writers practice their craft. There should be books along the walls anyone can pull down amd borrow, nice pens in cups.

When Johnny Marr, the guitarist for The Smiths,1 visited big record labels while the band was still deciding whom to sign a contract with, he was struck by the dearth of records in their offices compared to Rough Trade, the indie they chose, piled high with vinyl. What’s in the room not only signals a care for style but also commitment to beliefs.

Props lend focus: I have known for a long time that accommodations only help students do their best work. However, yoga props—bolsters, blocks, straps—have really highlighted for me that, rather than weaken an asana, they remove obstructions that get in the way of experiencing the essentials. A modification for one student only benefits all, and the crafty teacher is ready with a host of tweaks.

Competition and comparisons are stupid: Everybody is where they are, and everyone has their own thing to work on. For some reason, I am a parachutist with back bends but my forward folds are stiff, and when I am able to touch my nose to knee, I know I’ll probably lose that rare mobility in 24 hours. Ballet dancers are able to flop into any posture, first try, but they need to work on activating muscles to avoid hyperextension. Everyone is in their own world. A teacher can offer something new a student can choose to accept into their world, maybe something that lends spacious expansion or capacity where once there was limitation. Or we can inadvertently do something that leads to a student closing their world. There is no point to a pedagogue’s indignation that every name on the roster is not able to meet my standard for what they should be able to do by an arbitrary due date, or risk F for Failure.

Corpse Pose: Each yoga class, regardless of style, ends with savasana or corpse pose. After all the effort, you lie down to do nothing. It’s crucial to reabsorb and let settle and release what the class shook up. I need to adopt something like savasana in my Humanities classes and coaching.

For the teacher, pacing and sequencing are problems that never disappear. I like to fill class time tighter than most: no dead transitions or idling for the bell to ring or simply submit your work in Canvas and then you can go, everyone. Instead, an example of a dial-down that weirdly wakes up the room is the brief meta-chat at the end of a Harkness discussion, calling on three students (maybe those who had trouble getting in) to discuss how the discussion itself proceeded. A whip-around share-out of a line of writing can be a quick community builder if done well. I don’t like rah-rah at the end of a class but that is a matter of personality, and clap-it-up can work as a release. The point is, the last five minutes can be the most integral.

Learning is in class, but the real work is at home: I’m at a place as a yoga teacher where this is becoming a qualm. I learn from other teachers, what they’re doing differently. That requires attending their classes, not only teaching my own. But I’ve discovered growth over time requires home practice done alone around dawn and then again before dinner, repeated with consistency but also following a whim. Multiple yoga teachers and studio owners have told me the real yoga is in home practice. As an academic instructor, I like to believe magic happens in the classroom—with me and among peers. More and more, I hold doubts about homework turned in and want what matters most to happen during our scheduled time. However, if I aim for students to develop into practitioners, they have to practice on their own. Again, Mozart and Messi noodled interminably on their own. The Muse rarely descends into crowds.

A misalignment of purpose: I have begun to recognize that what students come to a yoga class for, and what I want to teach, aren’t in the same neighborhood. Of course, this has always been a mismatch in academics: I want to grow readers and writers while most students need a grade to move onto the next level. If I am effective or lucky, I win them over to literature. What’s tricky in yoga now is that I see asanas, the physical postures, are only a warm up for the real yoga, which has to do with consciousness. Complicating the misalignment is that classes in which yoga is served up as a sexy, sweaty workout are packed, and these are the studios that survive, financially. In The Craftsman, Richard Sennett returns again and again to the question of pragmatism versus purity, the edge between craft and art a master is always sharpening2.

To return to domain switching and the guitarist Johnny Marr: through the ups and downs of a rock star’s life, he always returned to his craft as a musician but also sought new ways of making interesting sounds, not just repeating the wonder of what he wrote with The Smiths. Sometimes moving forward meant setting aside the guitar for electronics, but these switch-ups only kept the guitar alive.

Next week, in another domain switch, I will visit the Stanford d.school with hopes of thinking in new ways about course design.

“Since my contemporaries, understandably, could not perceive my vision, they saw only a fool rushing ahead.” —C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, p. 356

I want to write in support of a certain sort of master teacher.

What is a master? I have been defining a master teacher as one who initiates students into the creation of their own internal landscape by which they navigate the artful application of a craft or subject. Such a master is a craftsperson of their subject and of teaching, itself.

A true master leads students down the forked road toward their own mastery of the subject. I do not mean master in the sense of one who lords over others. Rather, the opposite: this is a teacher who empowers a student in a subject, within and outside.

Why is this coming up now? I have been taking online classes from an expert in his domain, and from the first class, I recognized his brilliant, masterful knowledge of the subject and, selfishly, that I could learn a ton from him1.

Also, in the opening minutes of the first class, I could see how some of my students—and a few colleagues I know—might regard him an old-school yapper.

It can be uncomfortable to be around a master2.

After my reading in Richard Sennnett’s The Craftsman and recent writing about tacit learning, I now see what such a teacher is uniquely able to lend students. This master teacher communicates an inner world that is inherently alien but necessary for mapping one’s own world.

At first, I thought this master of his craft yapped to fill every space, every second in class, so nobody else could get in a word.

However, when I recently took his class again, I recognized that all of his seemingly inane stories are getting at a less-than-obvious, felt sense of the subject. His stories and metaphors teach the decision-tree a master in the subject follows. Rather than a procedural checklist, his yapping hints at when you might do this, or when you might do that.

His insistences on “the right way” can seem didactic, heavy-handed, absolutist. But he is also offering degrees of importance: he does not make a big deal of the “right way” for every step. These insistences mark what his much longer experience has determined is meaningful for technique.

What renders his apparent demands all the more tacit is that he will reverse himself. “What I told you to do last week, I’m now telling you to do differently” can drive a novice to quit, but his reversals are where the tacit pulls away from the procedural. Rule switches are what an intermediate student needs. There are times when a “must” is no longer a must because one is seeking a different outcome though it all appears a sloppy similarity from the outside.

A master can appear over the top since it is as if, once they begin class, they are possessed by their subjects, what to Jung is the daimon. The master is in their element, and for the student or observing administrator who does not live therein and is effectively walking in from the outside, it can feel like what the ’80s adolescent inside of me means when he mutters, “Take a chill pill.”

This week, in preparation for a visit to the Stanford d.school, I learned of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, this graph3 that describes the dip in confidence that comes with greater experience in a field:

A newcomer to a field is overconfident because they only see procedural knowledge. They don’t know how much they don’t know. What they don’t know is tacit knowledge. In year three through five of teaching, it was a breeze for me strut into the faculty room after a “successful” class and think, “There’s nothing to this!”

My students might have improved their scores. My surveys might have reflected my popularity. But an adolescent doesn’t know directions to the mall, even though they’ve been there a hundred times . . . until they begin to drive. As a teacher at that time, it was only me behind the wheel. That is to say, I was teaching students, not would-be practitioners, so they could only remain students.

The ego of such a master teacher as the one I have been describing can seem vaunted and ridiculous, but it is nothing like the ego I wore as a novice. When this master teacher vociferates, it is as if the subject is speaking.

Not egotistical at all, a vast territory of their inner “I” has been given over to their subject and is on show—a gift, especially when such a teacher may well feel exhausted by themselves on the drive home but goes on with the performance anyway out of a sense of mission and love for the field.

“Although in a lab the neophyte can be readily inducted in procedures, it’s harder for a scientist to pass on the capacity to look suspiciously for new problems in the course of solving old ones or to explain the intuition formed from experience that a problem is likely to wind up a dead-end. The difficulty of knowledge transfer poses a question about why it should be so difficult, why it becomes a personal secret.”

—Richard Sennett, The Craftsman, 74.

After the last Substack, I was asked what the instruction of tacit knowledge actually looks like. It struck me how little I have considered what Richard Sennett identifies in The Craftsman as the difficulty of knowledge transfer.

Why couldn’t any of the apprentices in Antonio Stradivari’s shop, not even his sons, make string instruments as virtuosic as his, a difference any professional musician can tell almost immediately?1

Knowledge transfer does not mean treating students or apprentices like empty vessels. A great deal of Sennett’s social critique as I understand it comes down to the importance of an individual’s, or a laborer’s, interpretation of their own work.

Rather, knowledge transfer means to initiate a student or apprentice craftsperson into a communal field of practice where they eventually may develop their own feel for making.

To adapt to an outer world of problems that arise, a practitioner must navigate an internal terrain, a map that resolves in greater clarity over time like that in a role-playing video game.

How can a teacher tell when a student is navigating tacit knowledge—and hence approaches mastery—as opposed to parroting procedure?

Tacit knowledge is on display when a student composing their senior speech tells the dean, “I like what I have so far, but it’s not at the place I want it to get to.”

Another example is when a wrestler says after a match, “I could tell the double-leg takedown was going to open up, and I just needed to be patient and keep working on other things until it was there.”

It could be when a student who is self-aware of their executive functioning looks ahead at what could be a rough week of assessments and athletics and then plans what they need to do on Sunday to set themselves up for greater breathability.

A poet works tacitly when she knows this batch of poems she is sending out is better than the last, closer to what she wants to accomplish for her own purposes.

Tacit knowledge in these examples has to do with self awareness, feeling what’s possible in a situation, guided by underlying why’s, but also avoiding “what is likely to wind up a dead end”.2

Practitioners cannot sidestep following procedures absorbed from another; an important turn, however, is one’s own self-selection of procedures fitting the circumstances of a moment.

At the same time, tacit knowledge might include knowing better when to disobey authority: “Coach, I know what you said to do, but it just wasn’t there.”

How can a teacher, coach, or mentor of teachers foster the development of conscious yet embodied knowledge in learners?

Below is an incomplete listing of elements that helped me learn a tacit feel in my domains:

1. Actual, visual demonstration of procedural knowledge—not just talking about it—with variations but also guidance as to when to employ different methods, or not.

2. Repeated practice kept fresh, varied, fun, and authentic, as well as on-the-spot, immediate feedback, ideally situated in one-on-one conferences or generalized in group instruction. A good coach does not let an athlete keep practicing the same poor positioning; at a certain point, though, it might be accepted that a junky move “appears to be working for her, and as long as she knows what she’s doing….” Learners also deserve to be able to critique the quality of practices offered, depending on whether they meet their internal needs.

3. Exemplars, models of quality, are co-evaluated.3 Careful selection of materials by the teacher is worth a summer of searching. Learners need a chance to imitate the moves they spot—creatively, playfully, observantly.

4. Shared rules of thumb, tricks of the trade, questioning schemas, and useful metaphors that aid quick navigation through the internal map of decision making.

5. Attentional direction: where the eyes should look and what to look for. When I revise a poem, my eyes flit between end words, repetends, POV shifts, breaks and caesuras, possible titles, which internal line might serve better as an opener or closer. New poets approach revision unsure where to direct their attention.

6. Ethics, boundaries, and higher purpose: so much of initiation into a community of practice is understanding what’s fair play and what’s out of bounds, shared standards of quality. Otherwise, it’s hard for a novice to know what’s a big deal and what you can surrender. Tacit learning is given expanded dimension—and paradoxically is somewhat limited by—the higher spirit or prohibitions passed on in a craft. Carol Bly, my writing mentor, insisted that what separates literature from genre fiction is an author’s underlying moral intelligence; her ethic gave my work direction for a long time and also closed off projects I might have followed. At a certain point, in order for rule-following to develop into tacit knowledge, the student-practitioner has to go inside and decide whether or not to adopt the ethic.

7. Sidelong to ethics, approaches and attitudes are just as important, and probably moreso at a certain point, than procedures. Last school year, I watched a master teacher of Math who shows, yes, how to complete the matrix yet also exhibits over-the-top, enthusiastic delight at the weird nuance of Math problems that come up in a set. Like the veteran lab researcher, he relishes problem finding as much as solutions.

8. Trust in one’s own likes and noticings are basic to finding feel. Sure, to only do what you like or prefer shrinks potential and limits the curation of a diverse repertoire. Yet if the goal is mastery, implying originality or a sense of personal direction, you have to steer yourself according to your own stars. “Start by learning to recognize what interests you,” writes Verlyn Klinkenborg in his outstanding Several Short Sentences about Writing4. “Most people have been taught that what they notice doesn’t matter, so they never learn how to notice, not even what interests them.”

9. Rituals around space and time inherent to a subject’s particular devotion to shared craft: sweeping dust in a shop, honoring the date to bring copies for one’s turn on the MFA workshop schedule, the taboo against non-wrestling shoes on the mats, the legitimization conferred by gathering around rolling whiteboards in a Math study session, handling fire and storing chemicals in a lab.

10. Recognition as a practitioner, a kind of imprimatur. When a college instructor I respected told me after a freshmen English class, “You’re a writer, man,” it granted permission to take my own work seriously. While others might feel pressured or singled out, I felt I’d been given a license to write more, take greater risks, assume my own stances as a practitioner, not just a student.

Good schools create a culture of best practice around #’s 1 through 3, maybe 4, and rituals of space/time. Excellent coaches take daily care with most of these as a matter of instinct. Teacher training programs raise ethics that later get set aside in the deluge of the everyday.

Still, how often are any of these practices intended for tacit learning?

If I were to place tacit knowledge at the heart of a freshman Composition course, there would be daily short writes with quick comments by the teacher. I’d hold conferences with individuals while the rest are working. Grammar conventions would be embedded in a sentence-composing approach that invites students to imitate structures employed by J.K. Rowling or Annie Dillard. A first pass at reading literature would ask them to annotate what they like as well as what bothers them. Rubrics for projects would be co-developed with students drawing from features they identify in mentor texts. Most of all, I would hope to steward a democratic culture of appreciating and making good work.

The push for quantifiable, standardized outcomes naturally draws the conversation in schools away from what cannot be seen and what is naturally hard to put into words—that is, tacit knowledge.

It might seem, too, that an educator cannot get inside the heads of every student in the room to help them create an internal landscape. Yet students are already creating internal narratives around practice.

One day this May, I was assigned to library supervision after school, and a group of genuinely terrific students were huddled around a tall back table. I had taught or coached them all, and it was one of those drawn-out days when the happiest thing that could possibly happen would be to chat.

They were talking about music, and one of them surprised me when he said he liked morbid emo bands from the ‘80s, the same bands I had listened to growing up.

The boy doubly surprised me because he comes across as energetically up tempo, the super-positive star of the cross country team, the guy who buoys others with his “Let’s go!” verve.

When I asked him why he would listen to Joy Division or The Smiths before a competition, he said, “I want to be the main character.”

He meant he likes to feel low, so he can rise up like an underdog, a backdoor approach to hype. I still laugh at his line and tell teacher friends. But being the main character also implies that every student is inhabiting a kind of video game.

Every class a student enters, then, is the start of a side quest or even part of the main storyline. How we teachers, as designers of learning, make possible an open-world of experiences can determine if they see themselves and choose to level up in the game.5

Much of the tacit knowledge nurses and doctors have acquired is precisely knowledge they cannot put into words[....] Bedded in too comfortably, people will neglect the higher standard; it is by arousing self-consciousness that the worker is driven to do better.

—Richard Sennett, The Craftsman, p. 51.

In some ways, teaching is teaching. Yet when I took up the instruction of yoga three years ago, it reframed my teaching of English and coaching of wrestling.

Richard Sennett says one way innovation takes place in a craft is in the crossing of domains. A craftsperson applies what’s done in one domain in a different field, and there can be a breakthrough.

In particular, my domain switch in teaching made me rethink the relationship between what Sennett would call tacit knowledge and explicit critique.

In all of my work at this point, I am trying to get at the feel of tacit knowledge. My concern is with the inside and outside of mastery.

Tacit knowledge is a degree of mastery sensed as a feel, an intuition, for what to do next and how much force to apply. Tacit knowledge is learned through embedded practice, which schools don’t often provide students outside of athletics.

My eventual instruction of writing—and my feel for how to write—levelled up in the two years I worked as a reporter at daily and weekly newspapers after college. Hustling three articles a day ended the plodding fussiness of my college writing. I had to form paragraphs fast.

Ironically, when I dropped perfectionism, my writing grew less sloppy and reached for higher, more consistent standards of quality.

Over time, I learned how taking time to nail the lede fit each consecutive paragraph into place. It helped to receive access to every article that came over the AP newswire, so I could follow the work of journalists I respected most. Tacit knowledge was developed through lots of practice in a variety of situations, adopting forms honed by masters.

As Sennett says, one gets satisfied or mediocre without critique. Relationship is at the heart of mastery, and the relationship that propelled my writing was with the desk editor. I wanted to write with style and power; at the same time, any mistake I overlooked was going to earn a shout from the desk editor across the newsroom and an embarrassing visit to her desk.

As a teacher of writing, I have followed Peter Elbow’s advice to begin feedback by noticing what I like in student work. Tough red-penning is only helpful once a student has begun to self-identify as a writer. Writing is hard enough. Tough early critiques can instill a fear for initiating writing, curtailing growth.

I had taken my writing seriously since AP Lang in junior year and through four years of college yet only began to develop a consistent and tacit feel in those two years working as a journalist.

Now, I write entirely through tacit knowledge, writing by feel whatever interests me. Playfulness summons effort. I refuse to grind.

After a MFA and many years of squeezing poems into the margins of my life, my written work only grows in minute degrees with occasional leaps of realization that often arrive in happy accidents.

What draws me most is what happens on its own as a natural result of process, beyond me or any hope for success though I do have to initiate the work and hold myself accountable. A good sign is when the work writes itself, and like an editor I just get to fiddle with the form. The same is true with my classroom teaching.

Teaching yoga is interesting because what mostly gets taught is procedural knowledge: press down with all four corners of the foot, lift the knees and activate the quads, even both sides of the clavicle.

Most people pay for a yoga class, though, to leave with a feeling. And from what I can tell, a true mastery of yoga is completely tacit, a felt awareness, a highly attuned working with internal sensation shaped by the external posture, resulting in a deep awakening of consciousness in every part of the body.

My procedural knowledge of yoga leap-frogged when I studied in Spain with a close disciple of BKS Iyengar, a widely recognized master. His studio ran differently from those in America. Students paid for a spot in a weekly class and could lose that spot if they often missed class. Students did not socialize, and they weren’t attending for a work out or to look sexy.

Physical adjustments were frequent; liability in Madrid appeared less of a concern than it is in LA. Critique was constant, both gentle and forceful. I suspect I levelled up1 more in four months than I would have in ten years at a studio here.

It was important I walked in already sure of my commitment to yoga practice. I was ready to be told what I was doing wrong, and the adjustments gave immediate feedback for how the placement of my shoulder should feel. I could remember the procedural knowledge and tacit sensation a physical adjustment provided better than words could convey. And words are easily forgotten.

What interests me now is what yoga books call “working in the pose”: I cycle through correct points—procedural knowledge—but then feel how to work inwardly with resistance or mobility in the left hip, as well as the sense of an energy flow. In the same way, I imagine a craftsperson judges the limits or flexibility of their materials through a feeling informed by experience.

In my first three years in an English classroom, I sought to learn the procedural knowledge a teacher requires: how to get kids to sit still to read and write, how to start and end class, systems for passing out and collecting papers.

In years four through eight, a tacit knowledge was formed in the service of wowing visitors and imagining I was saving kids’ lives. I developed some intuition for how to work with different students at different levels and with different problems. A vibe was fostered greeting students at the door, building relationships with them, noticing who was having a bad day and differentiating. A lesson was orchestrated with a clear sense of purpose and compelling models. Evidence of understanding was demonstrated by all. I thought I was hot shit.

At the same time, the lack of a more coherent sense of a So What nagged me. Why didn’t tacit knowledge lead to real mastery at this stage? Partly because it was about me, even when I thought it was about the kids. A real danger in year eight was what Sennett calls being “[b]edded in too comfortably.”

The trouble was, for some time I did not know what “higher standard” to reach for, and schools give awards for the level of tacit knowledge I had achieved, however limited in scope.

My purpose in the second decade of my career was to teach to a standard I deemed greater than any school’s. The reading and writing workshop allowed me to become a craftsperson of teaching more interested in empowering student agency and purpose. Kids could see themselves as readers and writers.

Tacit knowledge started becoming teaching mastery when the systems I was running could run themselves, and I could share those systems for adoption by colleagues and mentees. I was bored of myself as a teacher at this point. More interesting was initiating students and teachers in a model where they might accomplish their best work.

Now I find tacit knowledge and mastery are furthered by teaching across domains.

Like the writing workshops before, my wrestling team is a system that almost runs itself with others taking on and shining in different roles. My role is to be a presence with a plan. I largely operate by feeling what each wrestler or what the team needs. As with mastery of wrestling itself, it relies on an ever-expanding repertoire of possibilities and methods adaptable to novel, even weird situations that come up.

I used to try to smooth out rough edges as a teacher and coach, but now the novel situations are what’s exciting and welcomed.

Teaching yoga seems to serve the rest of my teaching by placing me back in the posture of a constant learner, someone who is not great or a master. Almost everything’s novel and therefore of interest. I can learn from anybody else because I don’t know too much.

Unlike at the start of my career, I am beginning with the So What, the “self consciousness” Sennett is saying tacit knowledge requires. It is a consciousness without self except insofar that there is a reflective someone who has decided to open to a clear awareness of what could be done.

What matters most to me is to get at the spirit moving inside a poem, a pose, or a classroom, a spirit I want others to be able to find and feel.

“A more satisfying definition of the workshop is: a productive space in which people deal face-to-face with issues of authority.” Richard Sennett, The Craftsman, 54.

I don’t know of a class as well organized—at the same time as geared toward student agency—as Nancie Atwell’s reading and workshop at the Center for Teaching and Learning in Edgecomb, Maine.

The contradiction fascinates me that authority can lead to or stymie agency—and ultimately the greatest growth.

Nancie was in charge of that school, her system. She was the school master. A speaker around the world and author of books sharing that system, her authority was powerful yet freeing.

Students at CTL sat around her and the other teachers for morning meeting and mini-lessons. But then they had the freedom to read and write more or less what they wanted in a system whose procedures were tight, tidy, and co-owned. They signed out books with one log, completed them with another, conferred with Nancie about the progress of their projects, knew where to find and return what supplies they required. In a tight container of practice, a workshop where skills were passed down and applied and demonstrated, students found their own reasons to do their best work.

When I taught middle school, I followed Nancie’s system as closely as I could in a larger system, maybe with more whole-class books. (The trick to more curricular freedom is to become department chair and to assign yourself the class you want just as Nancie created her own magnet school.) I found readers and writers levelled up faster because their work mattered to them. I’ve never seen such growth in a high-school class. Many read more than 30 books a year as opposed to the three to five in a traditional English class. Their booklists sometimes graduated from Diary of a Wimpy Kid to self-selected canonical classics like those by Shakespeare and Machiavelli. They wrote long, much more than I could read in draft form. More reading makes a reader. Writers write a lot.

Many good teachers establish authority in their rooms but do not offer choice or authorize agency. The system is one sided: present, assign, assess, repeat. Just tell me what to do. Give it to me, and I’ll give it back to you. A transaction whose final payment is a grade. Standards might be met, enduring understandings demonstrated in a few contexts. But independent mastery is not accomplished, truly, unless one uses a skill for one’s own purposes.

More than mastery, I’m interested in the issues of authority in the “workshop” that encourage or prevent it.

Nancie Atwell brought a spirit to the minilessons where she showed enthusiasm for what a writer was doing, a practitioner admiring another’s good work as Ron Berger describes in his An Ethic of Excellence: Building a Culture of Craftsmanship with Students.

My grad school mentor, Carol Bly, was another powerful authority who knew what she was talking about because she was a practitioner. It makes sense that authority contains the word author. Carol had been friends with EE Cummings and William Stafford. She’d edited and published literary magazines with her then-husband Robert Bly along with her own books of stories and essays. I surrendered to her insistences about how to do things, like avoiding the word it, even if there is a clear antecedent. She knew her stuff, engaged in the practice of literature, and expressed interest in me as her student.

Those were the cruxes for my buy-in as a student: 1) do you know your stuff? And, 2) are you at least a little interested in me and the improvement of my work?

Carol Bly gave incredible feedback1, and her negative feedback—usually followed by “ok?” as in “Better rethink this, ok?”—made her praise matter more.

We have grown suspicious of lecturers, teacher-centered teachers, for imposing their will and words on us. I have felt annoyed many times at classes all about the teacher, himself. Also annoying are professional development trainings where speakers proffer student-centered practices by lecturing the whole time.

On the other hand, a class so student-centered that little is actually taught is one reason for the erosion of the value of a secondary or college course. In such a class, the teacher vacates all pretense of authority outside of turning in grades, as if to say, “Who am I to tell you anything you don’t already know?”

I don’t like loose-feeling classes. I like classes where there’s a great deal to take in but also where students get to do a lot with the material.

A design teacher, Kimberly Brazell, told me she encourages inside-the-box thinking, not creativity without constraints.

One of the two greatest mathematics teachers I have worked with was a total authority in her classroom. I probably would have found her suffocating at first. She spent weeks setting up classroom systems, making parents question when the tests were going to start. But in April, the system ran itself, she never had to halt a moment to say what should not be happening, and they could focus on problem solving.

In the best classes, I’m saying, students own the room and system as much as the authority. They know where and how to replenish the graph paper on their own, so the teacher can confer with individuals. This sounds very elementary and middle-schoolish, but I remember feeling an excitement in college when the geology room felt like a place where geology was practiced; the digital design class was held in a room set up with circuitry boards; books were discussed in an attic space around a single long table. I imagine medical school courses finish with tough tests but demand ample demonstration of practice in chilled rooms with cadavers.

This week I tried a private retreat at New Camoldoli Hermitage in Big Sur, California. In the three daily services, monks sat in chairs facing each other. In a stunning yet simple chapel, light streamed from a narrow cone in the ceiling into a blue room over the spare altar table. Yet on the side where people sat, services felt like a family with one of the monks yawning and slouching. Just another day. The system was clear and prescriptive, but they each seemed free to be themselves. One of them gave a homily about three of the beatitudes. He sat in a chair on one end at the same level as us and looked each of us in the eye while calmly saying that each person had the pearl of divinity in them we should seek to look for.

It surprised me later to see a quote in a book from the little borrowing library in the communal retreat kitchen by one of the monks, who had lived at New Camoldoli and regularly visited ashrams around India. Thomas Matus writes, “Seeing a realized master for a long time is the way authentic disciples learn all they need to know about virtues and meditation practice [….] Metaphorically a disciple may be called an ‘apprentice’, but in a guru’s workshop the craft is something that cannot be taught, only experienced directly.”2

This leads me to wonder about presence in a classroom, the undefinable quality of authority that must come from single-minded devotion to a subject and one’s students. It can happen in first period that the light through the windows is gentle, holy even. The students are writing, and I look over their engagement with a calm I rarely feel elsewhere. There is purpose, work, a sense of satisfaction for some, maybe. The presence can be like that in a church or a mountain forest. I wonder what I did to help make this happen and whether the students feel it, too.

An ancient ideal of craftsmanship, celebrated in the hymn to Hephaestus, joined skill and community.—Richard Sennett, The Craftsman, 52

I just attended a symposium generously hosted by Loomis Chaffee School1, a boarding school in Windsor, Connecticut, focused on techne, an Ancient Greek name for the art of manufactured things, for craftspersonship in teaching. A circle of college professors and boarding school teachers, we examined techne as it relates to teaching writing—a technology we mostly performed by hand—alongside Socratic dialogue. The last session of each day focused on vibecoding our own apps and weighing AI as a teaching tool.

In this book The Craftsman2 I’m using to think about teaching in a philosophical yet ultimately pragmatic way, Richard Sennett makes a big deal of what’s lost with digital tools, including a sense of touch that medieval goldsmiths needed to assay worth just as a pro tennis player backspins by feel: “You get to know a terrain by tracing and retracing it, not letting the computer ‘regenerate’ it for you.”3

He explains how architects who were early adopters of Computer-Aided Design (CAD) forgot the feel of their lines as well as the larger context in which their buildings eventually would appear. They planned for expansive windows in luxury apartments, only to realize later, “irl,” the digitally designed vistas looked out onto the back walls of parking garages. AI cannot know, see, or feel its effects in lived contexts, either.

Still, I came to see that the ability to design, build, and tweak one’s own app could be for teachers what it must be like for craftspeople when they re-adapt their own equipment to suit the demands of a tricky project. A smith or welder might forge a bent bar in order to shape another piece actually intended for the final product.

The symposium perfectly modeled what I mean when I am drawing a parallel between Sennett’s ideal workshop of craftspeople in daily dialogue with each other across workbenches and faculty in a department office. I learned exuberance for others’ work from Alfie, an administrator at Yale. From St. John’s College Emeritus Professor John Verdi, I recalled the value of a teacher simply uttering a gnomic declaration and then leaving a void for students to dare to fill4. And like woodworkers, we shared little tricks of the trade: Maureen Chalfen taught us a useful 4-column system for developing text analysis with columns labelled Evidence | Analysis | Visitor | Process.

Over three days, we wrote Bard-style, passing around 11x17 pieces of paper with poems and paragraphs inside broad margins and added marks or annotations, analytical or creative, using grippy Japanese pens. We talked about handwriting in relation to a great Ross Gay essay, it being a technology capable of revealing the person, guided by the touch of the pen on wood fiber, malleable to fit space on a page and thus capable of enlargement, reduction, bending, and squeezing. Force and flexibility, as Sennett will later explain, are inherent to craft. Handwriting reveals the type of elementary schooling one had, whether shame was a part of that pedagogy, and whether you feel the need to clarify yourself for others or hide behind a personal encryption of illegibility, like I do mostly out of trying to keep up with the speed of my thoughts. Many have noted the irony that AI has heralded the return of blue books and in-class essays done by hand. As a techne, it surprised me to hear how even highly educated educators feel vulnerable about handwriting to be passed around. At the same time, most of us were eagerly filling our personal notebooks by hand with ideas and each other’s quotes.

It surprises me in a related way where Sennett revises himself, declaring, “A more satisfying definition of the workshop is: a productive space in which people deal face-to-face with issues of authority.”5 I want to unpack the tetchy implications of that relationship another time. But one of the greatest values of attending a PD like the Loomis techne symposium is the essential importance for the teacher to play the learner again. I’ve always thought that if a teacher is no longer learning, the circle is broken, and the work is dead.

The event that offered the most inspiring example of that word “generative” came from the Brian Eno movie,  Eno, which itself changes at every showing. In the sequence of interviews we saw one evening, he plays a song on a keyboard but then uses an app to remove every third note and then another to repeat a random note at regular intervals. Out of a just-nice tune, a complex landscape appeared.  In my final sharing for the symposum, I wrote a poem mashing up what struck me most from all of the texts and talking points and then used Claude Opus 4.6 to break up the poem I’d just typed with care. Ironically, the result is something that feels more human and un-LLM-able in its nonsensical, unplanned, kind-of-funny leaps.

Before my arrival in Connecticut, I was wondering what AI can do and what humans can do. I came to realize, through this workshop of teachers, that AI’s value to the writer and teacher of writing must lay in adding complexity, amplifying possibilities through criticism. I don’t want AI to simplify student learning. To skip over the difficulty that leads to knowing the territory of a text or skill “by hand” is to forego the mastery of a Mozart or Messi.6

On the final day, before a celebration of artifacts we created and shared, I was left inspired to do what only I can do, so I composed that poem. “How Eno-esque!” exclaimed Claude. On the other hand, if I truly endeavor to guide student writers toward their own voices, it requires them to locate what only they might say or observe. I’m not the first to observe this precludes perfect writing, which is exactly the goal of a student (or parent) striving for straight A’s.

The question I’m left with, still, besides what only I can do, is how to preserve the difficulty of learning that only comes, as Sennett says, from tracing and retracing lines, developing a feel for the territory–the hard canyon of learning–that mastery requires. I wonder if kids are now allowed to be as bored as Mozart and Messi were as small children when they had nothing to do but noodle around on a piano or soccer ball.

Then, on a walk between Loomis Chaffee’s campus to the coffeeshop in downtown Windsor, I passed a very green pond where a boy was waiting on two fishing lines propped on the guardrail. From a distance while approaching, I thought I saw him chuck something heavy into the water with a thud, wondered for a moment if he was up to something. Closer I asked if he’d caught a big, old turtle. 

“Three carp today!” he said. When I returned after two hours of sipping a latte and reading from the packet, he was still there, fishing for more while chatting on speaker phone.

Books about the art or science of teaching miss the gutty reality but also the precise force and finesse of the classroom master.

It’s not an art because educators aren’t okay with wherever a course may or may not arrive.1

Nor is teaching a science. We exercise control over certain variables, and we often begin a learning module with a question or a problem. A class is never so limited as a lab set-up, though. Innumerable variables affect any class populated with human beings.

Around year three of my career, working in a public desegregation magnet, I came to adopt the mantra “Whatever works”—whatever works to help as many of my eighth graders be able to write a decent, correct, personally meaningful essay and pass the Minnesota Basic Skills Test. A scientist is not satisfied with “Whatever works,” but in a pinch, a furniture maker or open-source programmer could be so pragmatic.

Teachers, like craftspeople, care about their materials, whether they print, staple, double-side, or digitize.

They work in community, a “shop,” usually with physical proximity to peers in practice, sharing methods, stealing lesson starters, and arguing over what rises to the level of good-enough work on student assessments and in our own practice.

When I meet someone who asks why I choose to teach, my first response is, “You mean I get paid to sit with teenagers and talk about books and writing?” An important turn in the career comes—if it does—when one decides to phrase our tasks as “get to” instead of “have to”.

We tailor what we do to the needs of the individuals who show up at the door. To do so relies on a practiced repertoire of skills, language, and tricks gathered over decades of experience.

More than half of that expertise eventually leads to working with what feels right and wise in the uniquely constellated happenings of B block on a Wednesday.

I probably say a thousand things a day at work; knowing what or when to speak is guided by an internal rubric negativa—knowing what not to say. “Don’t say that,” I tell myself, again and again, all day. And what is left to utter feels necessary and perhaps safe.

These ideas first arrived in my early 30s when I was trying to build a pergola and picnic table in my backyard and found myself drawn to Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman2 on a visit to the St. Paul Public Library.

Senett was philosophical, collectivist, and concerned with how skill has been passed on through generations of what he terms handworkers. In periodic golden eras, craftspeople held a certain power in their societies backed not by power but by the dignity of work of benefit done well and the necessity of their niche roles.

A generation later, the same master and journeymen smiths could just as well be hounded or held in contempt.

Far from informing the build of my colossal pergola, The Craftsman3 reflects exactly those ideals that had drawn me to teaching in a more progressive, constructivist century.

Yet my work ideals are still stoked by Sennett, like where he quotes early on the sociologist C. Wright Mills:

The laborer with a sense of craft becomes engaged in the work in and for itself; the satisfactions of working are their own reward; the details of daily labor are connected in the worker’s mind to the end product; the worker can control his or her own actions at work; skill develops within the work process; work is connected to the freedom to experiment; finally, family community and politics are measured by the standards of inner satisfaction, coherence, and experiment in craft labor.4

Yes! The best part of teaching is the work itself. I want things to go a certain good way that I can anticipate and guide. I cast my decisions for now in a vision of what this kid could become. And I want a say and the space to tinker with my own means, modes, and materials.

Around 2008, I gave a talk at the Minnesota Association of Independent Schools titled “Teaching as Craft: Reframing What We Do for the Mid-Career Educator.” The talk tried to cover too much in too little time; its abstractions weren’t what my audience might have been looking for in their third session of the day.5 But the ideas never evaporated. Every summer, I told myself I would compose these pedagogical essays that might become a book, but by the end of June, I didn’t want to think for a minute about school. The school year was too busy for reflective writing.

At the same time, I tell students that if an idea keeps coming back at different times, you have to do something with it.

These essays, to be published every Thursday on Substack, are me doing something with it, if only so I won’t be reincarnated another time with a thready tie and textbooks.