Always, we begin again.

Teaching is perhaps one of the stranger  jobs around. There’s a cyclical nature to the work, in the sense that each September, each January, the work that falls to you is likely to be pretty similar to the previous September, the previous January. It’s a handy check, really : mid-September, if you’re standing in front of a class of 25-30 assorted individuals, each with their individual needs, ambitions and personality disorders, probably none of them with an intrinsic desire to sit down, settle down and study, then the chances are you’re a teacher. If you’re jumping out of an aeroplane, rushing into a burning building, sweeping up horse manure, tasering a suspected criminal, then the chances are you’re not. A teacher. At least, I hope not.

It’s one of the paradoxes of the job : schools run on routine. Bells ring; children enter school. Teacher says “ Good morning class/ladies and gentlemen/7A” :  children stop talking and listen ( you hope ). Class lasts 40 minutes, with a starter, a main focus, and a plenary session to sum up at the end ( unless it’s one of those disintegrates-into-confusion-as-teacher-runs-for-the-door affairs I’ve been known to “facilitate” ). Bells ring; everyone off to playtime.  Although they’ll tell you the exact opposite, children thrive on routine and love the teachers who impose it, because it means they know what to do. 

And yet. There are days when it feels like you’re pushing a boulder up the hill. Again. The same bloody boulder  you rolled up yesterday. And the day before.  Or last year, on this very same day. And if you’re really unlucky, you’ll have a twerp dancing on top of the boulder telling you to get it to the top of the hill in half the time, assessing how well you roll it, giving you forms to fill out explaining the boulder while you roll it up, demanding that you roll it up MORE CREATIVELY. There are moments when I wonder if the patron saint of teachers is not Thomas Aquinas, but Sisyphus, an ancient Greek curriculum co-ordinator who was late handing in his documentation and so was condemned by the angry gods to roll boulders up hills for all Eternity.

If you’ve ever felt like this, Albert Camus might have some appeal for you.

There’s another deadening aspect to routine, as well. I’m reminded of Johnny, the horse which was owned by the grandfather of Gabriel, the central character in James Joyce’s short story “The Dead”. Johnny had been a mill horse, spending his days walking round and round in a circle to drive a starch mill; then Johnny’s owner thought he’d like to “ drive out with the quality to a military review in the park.” So he harnessed Johnny up to his carriage, and drove out through Dublin : as far as the statue of King William III, at which point Johnny began happily walking round and round in circles around the statue, pulling the carriage behind him. 

Always we begin again.

Joyce’s story-within-a-story ( ironically, clearly told time-after-time at a family Christmas party, always the same people at the same place at the same time doing the same thing every year ) is a metaphor of the spiritual paralysis which ( as he saw it ) gripped Dublin and Ireland as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth; but always reminds me that the cycle of the familiar can be safe, can be comforting, yet can give us the illusion of action, movement, progress, while taking us nowhere.

Always, we begin again. This phrase is often attributed to the Rule of St. Benedict, although it’s more a summary of the spirit of the rule than a direct quotation; it’s appropriate to teaching, in a sense, since in some ways the medieval monasteries are the ancestors of the teaching profession. The monks needed to divide the day up between assigned activities, prayer and work and study, each signalled by bells : so they devised the first timetables. Since Christianity was a religion of books, and wealthy patrons tended to dedicate young family members as oblates who might grow up to be  politically or practically useful, they developed a need for the teaching of literacy. The idea of a college, a fellowship of scholars dedicated to the transmission of knowledge, began here. Of course, in modern staff rooms, we don’t usually take vows of poverty ( no need, really ), obedience, silence, or indeed chastity.

Ancient history, of course. And yet…Benedict’s rule was a set of guidelines for those following the religious life in community, and those few words at least still have some relevance for people working in complex organisations, interacting with people from many different places, with all their different personal histories, their hopes, experiences and ambitions, and the stresses and conflicts which inevitably arise.

Benedict  did call his Rule “ a little rule for beginners.” I love that combination, “ little” and “beginners”. 

We live in a world stuffed full of experts. Every day, I receive a few e-mails from experts, offering to sell my school their expertise.Some of whom have so much expertise that they long ago left behind any responsibility for the things they’re experts about. And increasingly it seems to me that everyone has an opinion about everything, and it’s always so strongly stated. Sometimes I get the impression that I may be the only person left in the world who really doesn’t have a clue.

 So it’s nice to be reminded about the beginners, because in honesty, that might be all of us. It’s tough for teachers to think in these terms, because our role in a school insists that we take the role of experts : we’re supposed to know more than the kids. Yet  it’s worth thinking about what it means to be a beginner : stepping into an unknown situation, open to something new, making yourself vulnerable, trusting. To try to look with beginner’s eyes, as if we’re seeing things for the first time, to try not to go round in the same circle just because it’s there. Not to be trapped by our roles, by our identities, by the state of past relationships, and to imagine what it would be like to start again. Especially, to let go of our achievements : if we see ourselves as beginners, what matters is this day, now, this conversation, this step on our journey.

It’s an odd, and slightly bewildering idea, but instinctively I know there’s some truth here : my twenty-five years of teaching have shaped the way I think about the job; and because of that, I think the way I’ve always thought, and see what I’ve always seen. Strange, but I'm more aware now than ever before of how much I don't know and the things I have to learn.

Although I’ve borrowed from Benedict, I think all wisdom traditions have a version of this idea. I’ve read that Zen Buddhism has a practice called “Shosin” which is just this : the “Beginner’s Mind”, openness, curiosity and a willingness to embrace the beginner as opposed to the expert.

I’ve always loved a line from E.E. Cummings, from his poem “My father moved through dooms of love “ : “ And even if it’s Sunday, may i be wrong, for wherever men are right they are not young.”

This post is very largely babbling, because I’m still thinking my way through this. In some ways I think I might be an odd person to be involved in school leadership. Or perhaps just an odd person. Anyway, best wishes to all good teaching folk ( and non-teaching folk, for that matter ) wherever you may be.

 And here’s to another term of absurd heroics.