Asymmetry & Authorship

Essay VII in The Ghost in the Classroom series

The Life of the Party

She could be silent all day. She could be charming or awkward, eloquent or tongue-tied, sober or very much otherwise. She could spend a lengthy part of the reception slumped in a chair, vomiting into a bowl of rose petals, and when she stood up the room would still turn towards her. People would still be talking about her at midnight, and for years afterwards, and the story they told would be a story about her wedding. Nobody would leave thinking the day had belonged to anyone else.

She is the bride.

Everyone at a wedding makes the wedding what it becomes. The best man stands up to speak, and the room decides, sentence by sentence, whether he is funny. The guests matter collectively, by dancing or not dancing, by staying late or slipping away after the cake; a wedding with thirty guests is not the same event as a wedding with three hundred. The families matter. The groom matters. But every one of them is contributing to an event that has already decided where its centre is.

The bride does not have to perform her significance. She does not manage the attention of the room or earn her place minute by minute. The event secures it for her. Her formal role and her relational significance coincide point for point: to be designated the bride is to be the person around whom the day arranges its meaning.

And yet she does not control the wedding. She cannot decide whether the speeches land, whether an uncle picks a fight about politics, whether the band is any good, whether the evening catches fire or extinguishes itself. She is the most significant person present and still one participant among many.

This is the first thing the bride teaches us, and it is the thing our profession most consistently forgets. Asymmetry is not sovereignty. A person can occupy an asymmetrical position within an event without being in charge of what the event becomes.

The bride answers a question I left open in my earlier essay, You Are Here. There I argued that a lesson is not the execution of a plan but an event, made what it becomes by everyone present, and that nobody, the teacher least of all, can describe it from outside as though they had merely witnessed it. That argument raises a question it does not settle. If everybody authors the lesson, does everybody author it in the same way?

They do not. A student at the back mutters something and the lesson bends slightly. The teacher says the same thing and it bends differently, and further. Thirty-one people are making the event, but they are not thirty-one interchangeable contributors to a shared document. The event is asymmetrical.

Here is the difficulty, and it is the whole difficulty of this essay. We have to name that asymmetry without sliding back into the old picture, the one that still governs most of what is said about teaching, in which the teacher is the author and the students are the material. The bride shows that it can be done. Everyone authors a wedding, and the wedding is asymmetrical all the same.

So my claim is this. A lesson is authored by everyone in it, and authored unequally. The teacher’s greater share of that authorship is real, but the title does not supply it. The room confers it, it can lapse while the title stays exactly where it was, and our professional vocabulary has almost nothing to say about either.

That silence is not neutral. Silences never are. Somebody always pays for what a profession declines to say, and in this case it is teachers who pay, privately, and usually alone.

No single author

There is a small etymological coincidence here, which I offer as a motif rather than as evidence. In Spanish the bride is la novia, from a Latin word built on novus, new; English novel and novelty reach back, by other roads, to the same root.¹ Just as a wedding is unique, so is a lesson - even the most ordinary Tuesday afternoon lesson, which no amount of planning will ever produce twice. Human events are novel in the plainest sense: the people who take part in them bring into existence something that was not there before.

But a novel is also a narrative, and a narrative need not speak in one voice.² A story can be formed through many voices, none of which is merely material for another. Those voices do not simply coexist. They answer one another. What one voice means is altered by the voices around it, just as what has already been said changes what can be said next. Nor need they resolve into a single final voice that tells us what the story ultimately means. The narrative stays open for as long as its participants can answer, alter, resist and add to what is already there.

That is what authorship means in a lesson. The event is not simply new; as it unfolds, it is narrated into existence by the people taking part in it. What one person says changes the significance of what another can say next. What has already happened alters the meaning of what happens afterwards. Nobody in the room is finished, either: what a person has been in the lesson so far does not settle what they can become within it. By the time the lesson ends, its story belongs exclusively to none of them.

But a shared story is not an evenly shared story, and the wedding makes the difference visible.

Everyone present shapes what the wedding becomes, but the bride occupies a different position within its narrative. She is la novia: not the sole author of the event, but the person around whom its story is disproportionately organised. The other voices remain real, consequential, capable of changing everything. They simply do not enter the story from the same place.

A lesson has no bride. But it too becomes a story as it happens, authored by everyone present and owned by none of them. And like every story with more than one author, it has not been authored equally.

This is exactly where the analogy breaks, and exactly where it becomes most useful.

Breaking the wedding

The institution designates somebody the teacher in the same way that the wedding designates somebody the bride. There is a timetable with a name on it, a contract, a register, a professional identity, a legal duty of care. Nobody in the room is in any doubt about who the teacher is.

Here is the difference, and everything else in this essay follows from it. The bride’s formal role and her relational significance coincide. The teacher’s can come apart.

A person can remain unquestionably, institutionally, legally and professionally the teacher while their words, their silences, their instructions and their proposals can sometimes barely be noticed in the classroom. Every teacher has seen this. Most of us, if we are honest, have been it. The title is intact, the register is taken, the worksheets go round, and something that ought to be present is not.

You know the lesson I mean. You planned it properly. The materials were good, the timings were sensible, the instructions were clear and you gave them clearly. Nobody was rude. Nothing went wrong that you could have written down afterwards. And somewhere in the first ten minutes, without a single moment you could point to, your words stopped landing. You heard yourself explaining things twice. You heard your voice become slightly louder and slightly brighter, the way voices do when they are compensating for something. The activity went on, the bell went, and you walked out with the peculiar exhaustion of having worked very hard at something that was never quite happening.

And on Thursday you went over the same topic with the same group - and it was as effervescent as it was effortless.

Arguably, the difference goes further. The bride enters the room surrounded by expectations about how she is to be seen. The occasion itself supplies much of the interpretation. The teacher enters under no comparable guarantee. Before speaking, they are already being interpreted by the people in front of them. And interpretation is authorship. The teacher does not merely author the event; the teacher is also authored within it. Their significance is partly constituted by the very people whose actions they are institutionally expected to direct.

Words fail me

Ask the profession what happened and it will offer you a handful of words: classroom management, rapport, engagement, presence. Each of them names something real. Each of them also puts the whole thing inside one person. Classroom management makes it a technique you failed to apply. Rapport makes it a warmth you failed to generate. Engagement makes it a state the students failed to enter, which in practice means a state you failed to produce. Presence makes it a quality you failed to possess. Whichever word you reach for, the verdict is delivered to the same address, and the address is yours.

Classroom management is not a language for relational authority. It is what a profession says instead of having one.

When the only language available describes an experience as a personal deficiency, people stop describing it. They keep quiet about their own lessons, or they say it about somebody else’s.

Nobody says of a bride at her own wedding that she is technically the bride but the room doesn’t really treat her as one. We say exactly this about teachers, usually in staffrooms and usually not kindly. That we can say it at all proves something. The teacher’s significance is not secured by the event the way the bride’s is. It has to come from somewhere else. This is the point at which institutional authority and relational authority separate, and it is the point at which talk of classroom management runs dry of lexis.

Much of social reality exists because people collectively treat things as significant.³ That does not make those things imaginary. Money, borders, marriages and exam grades are all sustained by collective acceptance, and every one of them has consequences that are entirely real for the people living inside them. It follows that an action does not necessarily contain its own significance.

In Essay VI: You Are Here, I described Ricky Wilson of the Kaiser Chiefs swinging his microphone above his head at a concert in Buenos Aires. The movement itself was not anthemic - the event made it so. Put the same movement in front of a half-empty stadium of people looking at their phones, and it is merely ridiculous.

The movement has not changed - its significance has.

Classrooms work like this all the time. A teacher pauses and thirty students fall silent. The same teacher pauses at another moment, with the same group, and nobody notices. The pause has no authority of its own. Whatever it carries, it carries because of the relational field in which it happens.

So authority exists, in part, because people behave as though it exists. This is easily misheard, so let me be blunt about what it does not mean. It does not mean that authority is popularity, or charisma, or student approval. It does not mean that students are privately voting on whether to take the teacher seriously. Authority is not a referendum held inside thirty heads.

Proposing Reality

What the aforementioned pause carries, when it carries anything, is a proposal. A teacher is continually proposing a reality to the room.

Mostly the proposal is implicit. It says: this matters. This is what we are doing now. This boundary means something. My words deserve your attention. This activity is worth entering. For the next hour, this thing we are doing together is real.

A kindergarten teacher had planned to take the children outside, but it starts raining, so she changes the plan: they will stay inside and sing a song instead. Nobody votes. Nobody needs persuading that this is what should happen next. The children simply begin to sing. There is something psychologically remarkable in how unremarkable this is. Somehow, one person's account of what should happen next becomes the reality which the group inhabits.

The teacher can make that proposal. What the teacher cannot do is guarantee that the room will inhabit it simply because the institution has supplied their title. The bride proposes nothing; the wedding has already proposed her. The teacher’s proposal is always exposed to the possibility that it will never become a place anybody lives.

This is not persuasion, and it is not “buy-in”. A proposal of this kind is not an argument that the room weighs up and accepts. It is a world the room may inhabit fully, partially, differently, or not at all, and the teacher cannot determine which alone.

Put plainly: the room grants the teacher the power to propose a reality it is willing to inhabit. Nobody in the room sits down and decides to grant anything, of course. But that is the shape of it. The power to propose is itself conferred, and what is proposed has to be somewhere people can go. The teacher’s task, then, is not to make people believe. It is to make the lesson believable: not plausible, but habitable, a reality that can be entered and occupied rather than merely watched.

In You Are Here I gave the first part of this a name, the grant: the tacit permission through which a group lets the teacher’s words and actions hold enough significance to give direction to what happens next. The grant is not the job title. It is what the job title can never guarantee.

Holding and Shifting

But a grant names a standing, and a lesson lasts an hour. The continuing condition in which that standing stays operative, in which the teacher’s authorship keeps carrying its distinctive weight, is the hold. When teachers say a lesson went well, they very often mean, without having the word for it, that the hold was there, albeit perhaps fluctuating, throughout.

This is also why so much lesson observation misses what it came to see. An observer can arrive with a form, tick every box on it (objectives shared, instructions checked, wait time given, pairs rotated) and leave without having recorded the one thing that decided the lesson. The hold appears on no form. It is not a behaviour anybody performs. It is a condition everybody is in, and conditions do not show up on checklists. Most teachers have been praised for a lesson they knew was dead, or marked down for one they knew was alive, and have said nothing, because the form had no word for what they knew.

It is tempting to picture the hold as something the teacher has, like a grip on a rope, exerted on everybody else. That picture is wrong, and a great deal of flawed advice has been built upon it. Techniques may influence the conditions in which a hold becomes possible, but they cannot manufacture from one side a condition that only exists between people. The hold exists relationally. The other people in the room are taking part in producing the very condition in which the teacher’s authorship can matter. A teacher does not hold a class. The teacher and the class are in a hold together, or nobody is held at all.

Anyone who has taught for more than an hour knows the “opposite” experience:  the shift. Something that the room responded to a few moments ago no longer produces the same response. You feel it before you can name it. A laugh arrives half a second late. A student who was looking at you is now looking at the desk, and so is the student beside her. You give an instruction you have given a hundred times and it hangs in the air a moment too long, as though the room were deciding whether to pick it up. The same voice, the same instruction, the same pause, and it is received differently. Nothing dramatic need have happened.

It would be easy to explain the shift with a list of causes: boredom, fatigue, a joke that misfired, a difficult student, the slump after lunch. Those things are real. They are not the explanation. They happen within the relational field and take their significance from it. The same joke can break the hold one day and deepen it the next. The same tired class can stay with you or drift away. And when nothing on the list applies, teachers reach for the one cause that always seems to: themselves. What actually changes, at the level where the shift occurs, we do not know.

I would rather say so than invent a mechanism, which is what our field tends to do whenever it meets something it cannot measure. These terms are diagnostic before they are explanatory. They let us see something. They do not yet tell us why it is there. That is not a weakness in them. It is the order in which understanding has always had to arrive.

The hold is not the lesson

It would be easy to conclude from all this that a strong hold is the goal, and that the best teacher is the one who keeps it most securely. That conclusion is wrong, and it is worth seeing exactly why.

I have in mind a teacher who was widely regarded as having exceptional classroom management. For ninety minutes he could control almost everything that happened in his room. He talked constantly. He directed, corrected, interrupted, and talked over students when they spoke. The students worked. They got through the material. There was almost no disorder.

From the corridor this looked like formidable authority, and in one sense it was. The hold in that room was formidable.

But almost nobody else in that room was allowed any meaningful authorship of the event. He wrote and rewrote the whole landscape of the lesson himself, continuously, from the first minute to the last. The students were present. They participated. But they participated in a reality that had been authored almost entirely on their behalf. Anyone who was ever a student in a room like that will remember it.

Imagine a lesson that followed its plan perfectly, in which nobody altered its course or contributed anything unforeseen. His lessons came very close to it. The hold in that room was formidable, and almost all of the event was authored by one person. The lesson had many participants, but only one story. Is that the ideal lesson?

Condition, not destination

Which brings us back to the bride, and to the deepest difference between her and the teacher.

At a wedding the asymmetry is the point. The event is meant to stay organised around her. Nobody leaves a wedding feeling that the bride’s significance ought gradually to have been shared out among the guests.

Teaching is not like this. The teacher’s asymmetry is not the destination. It is a condition of possibility. Relational authority is the condition under which the teacher's authorship acquires its asymmetrical significance within the event.

Without some asymmetry, without a grant and a hold, a lesson cannot become anything in particular. Somebody has to propose the reality. But the purpose of the teacher’s relational authority cannot be the continued reproduction of the teacher’s relational authority. A lesson organised for that purpose is a lesson behaving like a wedding. The people in front of us are not there to inhabit a reality somebody else has written. They are there, among other things, to become capable of authorship themselves.

Writing ourselves into existence

And authorship reaches further than events. Jerome Bruner argued that self-making is a narrative art: that people become who they are through the stories they tell, about the world and about themselves, and go on becoming it as they keep telling them.⁴ If that is right, then nobody in a classroom is only authoring the lesson. Each of them is also, in small and mostly unnoticed ways, authoring themselves.

In a language classroom this is close to literal. A learner is becoming somebody who can mean things in a language that was not yet theirs, and every utterance of theirs that comes to matter in the room is a small piece of that self being made.

This is why the question of who gets to author the lesson is not a question of style or preference. In a language classroom it decides whether learners get to become somebody in the new language, or only to rehearse somebody else’s lines.

The bride’s asymmetry is the destination. The teacher’s asymmetry is the condition. Nothing follows from this about the teacher stepping aside, still less disappearing. A teacher who pretends not to hold the asymmetry has not given it away. They have only stopped being answerable for what it does. Without the asymmetry there would be no event in which anybody else’s authorship could matter. The point is what the asymmetry is for.

History enters the story

There is one more difference. The bride, with luck, does this once. The teacher meets substantially the same people again and again, week after week, sometimes for years.

It is natural to assume that the relational field simply continues from one lesson to the next, like a conversation picked up where it was left. It does not.

The relational field is constituted anew in every event. What persists is not the field. What persists is history. People carry their previous encounters with them: successes, humiliations, private jokes, old conflicts, expectations, affection, irritation, the memory of having been recognised or overlooked. All of it walks into the next lesson. None of it determines what that lesson will become.

So the relationship has continuity, and the event does not repeat. Every lesson is novel. Nobody in it is new. Each person arrives partway through a story they have been telling for some time, about this class, this teacher, this language, themselves. None of those stories is final. The next event can answer what came before without simply repeating it. The event is unprecedented. Its authors are not.

This is the strange condition in which teachers actually work. We return to a room full of history and find ourselves, every time, at the beginning of something that has never happened before. Last Tuesday’s grant is not carried over. Last week’s hold is not stored anywhere. And yet nothing starts from zero.

You Are Here

Every teacher knows the Monday after a wonderful Friday, when you walk in expecting to pick up where you left off and discover that the room has to be earned again, from somewhere further back than you thought. Every teacher also knows the opposite: the group you had quietly given up on, who arrive one wet Thursday and, for reasons nobody will ever reconstruct, let you in.

At this point an essay like this is supposed to turn into advice: how to secure the grant, maintain the hold and prevent the shift. I am not going to do that. I do not know how, and I am suspicious of anyone who says they do. What they are describing is technique, and they are calling it something else.

Some teachers sustain extraordinary holds with almost no visible effort. Others meet the shift again and again, however carefully they prepare. The same teacher, with the same students, in the same room, can live one lesson as something alive and the next as something to be got through. Nobody yet knows why.

That is not a failure. It is the right place to stand. Before something can be explained it has to be seen, and nothing is seen clearly until it has a name. Teachers have never been short of the experience. Most have felt the hold arrive and felt it go, and walked out of a room unable to say what had changed. What they have been short of is language, and without language the experience has had only one place to go. It has been filed as private triumph or private failure, mentioned in staffrooms as luck or as a bad day, and otherwise borne alone. Grant, hold, shift: none of these words explains it yet. What they do is give it back to the room it happened in. Once you have them, you will not stop noticing what they name.

And that is where the teacher and the bride finally part company. The bride never has to wonder whether she is still the bride. Whatever happens in the room, the room cannot unmake her. Teachers know the other experience. We walk in with the same title as yesterday, the same responsibilities, sometimes the same plan, and discover that what worked yesterday does not work today; or, just as mysteriously, that it works better. The institution can tell everybody who the teacher is. It cannot determine what being the teacher will mean once the event begins.

The bride knows what she will be when she enters the room.

The teacher does not.

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Notes

1. The Real Academia Española derives Spanish novio, novia from a reconstructed Latin form novius, built on novus, “new”; among the senses the dictionary still records is a person about to marry or newly married. English novel (through Italian novella) and novelty (through Old French novelté) descend from Latin novellus, a diminutive of novus: the words are cousins sharing a root. See Real Academia Española, Diccionario de la lengua española, 23rd ed., online version, s.v. “novio, via”; and the Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “novel” and “novelty”.

   
   

2. The account here of narratives formed through multiple voices draws on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concepts of polyphony, dialogism and unfinalizability, particularly as developed in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics and his later writings on the novel and the utterance. Polyphony describes a narrative in which distinct voices are not simply subordinated to a single authorial consciousness; dialogism emphasises that utterances acquire meaning in relation and response to other utterances; unfinalizability resists treating a person or consciousness as finally complete or exhaustively defined. The application to classroom authorship here is my own, and differs from Bakhtin in one important respect: the argument of this essay is precisely that the voices participating in a lesson do not have equal force within the event.

   
   

3. John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York: Free Press, 1995). The essay borrows the general observation that social reality is sustained by collective acceptance, not Searle’s apparatus of institutional facts; indeed its argument is that a teacher’s institutional status and relational significance can diverge.

   
   

4. Jerome Bruner, “The Narrative Creation of Self”, in Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), ch. 3; see also Jerome Bruner, “Life as Narrative”, Social Research 54, no. 1 (1987): 11–32.

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A note on the writing process: all ideas, arguments, and professional perspectives expressed in these essays are my own. Generative AI was used in the drafting and editing of the text. The editorial direction and responsibility for the final content remain mine.