Teaching, at a certain point in one’s career, begins to feel like the 1993 Bill Murray film, Groundhog Day1.
Workers of all stripes can feel as though they live the same day repeatedly, as if in life after life. Still, the nature of the school year and life in schools especially pronounces a felt sense of repeated births.
There are many days when a school teacher wonders why he did not graduate with his peers, why he continues life on campus, ad infinitum.
It’s like I have a task to finish, work yet undone, a realization to fulfill. I have not passed the test, and so under the cosmic redo policy, I take and retake the school year.
At times it feels I have been captured by the schedule of blocks, unable to go out for lunch like non-teaching adults one hears of, captured by the calendar of grading periods until the tantalizing rest over breaks after which we are born again in the pedagogical corpus.
We teachers live the ethos of getting better and better, but better how?
I used to think I would perform better for my students, colleagues, administrators, parents at another revolution of Family Day: “He’s such a good teacher!”
At the start of Groundhog Day, Bill Murray plays Phil Connors, the wry weatherman who forecasts six more weeks of winter or an early spring while on and off the TV camera, he condescendingly craps on everyone around him.
One presumes he has been doing the job for some time on the first of the film’s Groundhog Days; everyone’s wary of his clever, embattled schtick. A smarmy attitude of mean-cool defends his fragility against the dreary boredom of a life that makes little difference against the cold. Inside, he rages over barely getting what he deserves.
John Dewey wrote in Democracy and Education, “Work is psychologically simply an activity which consciously includes regard for consequences as part of itself; it becomes constrained labor when the consequences are outside of the activity, as an end to which activity is merely a means.”2
Day after day brings the same encounters with the same faces who do not seem to recognize as the teacher does that small talk outside this very same building under similar March skies has taken place many times before. (It is a strange fact that while every individual is different, faces over the decades can begin to echo those of the past.)
Through many incarnations of “again,” the ego drives itself off a cliff in despair, later seeks to benefit from its knowingness in a tenured self-sure security, sleepwalks through the routine in resignation of powerlessness, until finally is left with nothing better to do than what yoga people would call lifting the vibration not in spite of the routine but in acceptance of it. But that epiphany isn’t for certain, at least not lived with consistency.
Dewey follows the earlier passage with “Work which remains permeated with the play attitude is art.”
The carousel of school years—and knowing how it’s all going to go—is a gift to one whose professed love of good books informs him there’s nothing to get ahead of, nothing to escape, and nobody’s going to remember you more than a “Phil! Phil Connors!” in the story of their own incarnating.
A strange fact of teaching is we do not know how our instruction lands or not inside of our students. A lot of tumultuous young people can be paradoxically affect-less in class.
Then you get a single comment in a course reflection or survey that shows somebody really did get what you were trying to convey, not just repeating your words to ensure the ‘A’, but in language of their own that arrives at what could only be a deep, felt knowing of the thing.
I no longer believe in this world’s Progress, but a teacher can, literally, do better.
This school-year start is my 25th, and there are so many ways I could approach the routine of assemblies, class, cafeteria lunches, meetings, games, and graduation. I know because like Siddhartha I’ve lived them all, and I can say almost all of the magic in schools remains in the experience of teaching and coaching the beings that, for whatever cosmic reason, are scheduled to appear for B block.
I’m going to live the archetype, not in the inflationary way Jung warned of, nor alternatively as a husk of a person inside a teacher’s costume.
But the good work cannot only be a feeling inside me.
In his book The Craftsman3, Richard Sennett contrasts the German concept of Erlebnis, “how it feels” in a particular moment, with Erfahrung, a word for “the experience of craft,” an accumulated knowledge from experience over a long, growing time. In this way, his philosophical view of pragmatism fundamentally differs from our everyday sense of a means to an end. Sennett says:
Taken just as a concept, what does the ‘craft of experience’ imply? We would focus on form and procedure—that is, on the techniques of experience. These could guide us even in encounters that happen only once [my emphasis, looking over my shoulder at Bill Murray] by furnishing an envelope of tacit knowledge for our actions. We would want to shape the impress [sic] people and events have made on us so that these impressions are intelligible to others who do not know the same people we know or lived through the same events. As appeared in the discussion of expertise, we would try to make the particular knowledge we possess transparent in order that others can understand and respond to it.
Such a view of what a master teacher wishes to confer also points at the profound error schools and colleges undertake when they emulate an audience-capture model of business.
One benefit of a teacher’s Erfahrung is you can see how what you’re going to say or do is going to go because you’ve lived that teaching moment, that life in a sense, so many times before. “Yikes, this easily could lead to an endless series of follow-up meetings….” And on that tiniest of intuitive voices, you choose wisdom.
Because you know how it’s going to go, you can save Ned Ryerson from the icy pothole, catch the falling boy, learn the piano, and really be there at the unavoidable death in the small, reiterative world of campus life.
This school year, I’m going to play it close to the vest: start lessons with what’s most important, consciously selecting, planning, and reiterating those “techniques of experience” I have found that over time lead to an “envelope of tacit knowledge” allowing students to take action in my subject.
Last week, the first of regular classes, I tried in lessons to refrain from saying hardly anything students don’t need to hear to learn (except on Friday morning after dorm duty the night before, exhausted and after a ton of coffee), but rather I want to use what Sennett elsewhere calls expressive language to make transparent—through showing and sympathetically describing—not just forgettable procedures but to map a landscape of tacit knowledge.
One can choose, again and again, to repeat the school day, knowingly, traversing its crowded sidewalks to arrive at a plastic chair and there play what one has practiced and mastered.
Groundhog Day, directed by Harold Ramis (1993; Culver City, CA: Columbia Pictures, 2008).
John Dewey, Democracy and Education [1916] (New York, Macmillan, 1969), 241-242.
Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008), 288-289.