You Are Here

The Ghost in the Classroom: Essay VI

I. You Are Here

We teachers have a habit of describing classrooms as though we were never there.

The staffroom is full of such descriptions. Fourth year were impossible today. They wouldn't do anything at all. Nothing worked with them. There is no need to sneer at this language. Every teacher speaks it, and sometimes it simply feels accurate. Sometimes, for whatever reason, a class really does go badly.

But notice what the language permits. It lets an event in which we took part be described as though it were weather - something that rolled in over the hills and happened to us. The profession is rich in words for methodology and techniques, and strangely poor in words for the happenings between the people in a room. Where that vocabulary runs out, the weather report takes over.

But you were there.

II. The Plan vs. the Lesson

During my Cambridge Delta Module 2, one student in an assessed lesson diverted the planned sequence far enough that the tutor afterwards asked me: “Doesn't this guy ruin your lesson plan somewhat?”

These, his words, have outlasted almost everything else about that day. What outlasted is the precision of the phrasing. He did not say the student had ruined the lesson. He said lesson plan. Without meaning to, he had placed a distinction inside the question: there is the plan, and there is whatever actually happens in the room. A student can disrupt the first, divert it, even ruin it. It is far from obvious what it would mean to ruin the second.

Consider what existed before anyone walked in: aims, target language, materials, anticipated timings, stages, predicted problems... What did not yet exist was a lesson.

Borges tells of an empire whose cartographers, devoted to exactitude, produce a map the size of the empire itself, coinciding with it point for point.¹ Teaching harbours its own version of that fantasy: with enough planning and enough precision, what happens will one day correspond exactly to what was foreseen. But the teacher's map faces a problem the cartographers were spared. When a lesson plan is drawn, the territory itself does not yet fully exist.

III. The Set List

In 2008, I saw The Kaiser Chiefs perform in Buenos Aires. I remember very little of the set list. What I remember is Ricky Wilson standing on a monitor speaker, swinging the microphone above his head, and the sense that something was happening between the band and the crowd that could not have been written down beforehand.

Of course there was a set list. There had been rehearsals. The songs had been practised hundreds of times. But none of those things was the gig - they were the preparation for it - but preparation cannot contain the event in advance. The set list tells you what was supposed to happen. It cannot tell you what the gig was.

A set can be performed successfully without the performance ever becoming an event that exceeds it.

The set list is not the gig. The lesson plan is not the lesson.

IV. Saturday Night

Leave the stage altogether. Arrange a Saturday night: book a table, decide who is coming, agree where to meet, sketch something loose for afterwards. It is a good plan. It is not Saturday night.

Then the people arrive. Someone is late. Someone cancels, and somebody nobody expected turns up in their place. A conversation swerves, the table is kept two hours longer than intended, and the bar chosen for later never happens at all. Afterwards, nobody remembers how faithfully the itinerary was executed. They remember what happened. They remember how they felt.

What happened was not assembled beforehand and then attended. It came into being through the people who were there: their lateness, their arguments, their jokes, who ended up talking to whom. An event of this kind is not delivered. It emerges.

So does a lesson. A lesson is an event.

V. No Alarms and No Surprises

Everyone knows plans change. That is not the interesting part. The interesting question is whether anyone would really want them not to.

Picture a Saturday night purged of every unpredictable element: every conversation foreseen, every reaction known in advance, every deviation designed out. It would run flawlessly, and something essential would have quietly left the table. No alarms and no surprises is a reasonable thing to ask of a train timetable - it is an odd, even undesirable, thing to ask of an evening among human beings.

It is also an odd thing to ask of a lesson. Contingency is usually treated as the residue of inadequate planning, something the truly expert teacher will one day eliminate. It is nothing of the kind.

Hannah Arendt saw that action, unlike fabrication, always takes place among a plurality of people who respond in ways no one can fully foresee, least of all whoever set things in motion.² Participation entails contingency. The capacity of a human event to become something none of its participants anticipated is not a defect to be engineered away. It is part of what makes it an event at all.

It also changes what a teacher's direction is. The teacher proposes a task, a question, a line of thought. Others may take it up, bend it, resist it, sustain it, drop it, or return to it twenty minutes later. The title of teacher does not, de jure, guarantee that the next proposal will carry. What lets it carry is quieter: a tacit permission, extended by the group, through which the teacher's words and actions are allowed enough weight to give direction to what happens next. This is “the grant” - never banked, never guaranteed simply because it was there a moment ago.

VI. There Is No Outside

Back, then, to the staffroom. Fourth year were impossible. Nothing worked. Perhaps. But something is missing from those sentences.

You were there. There is no outside.

The teacher does not stand at the edge of the lesson observing an event produced by everyone else, stepping in now and then to act upon it. The teacher is inside it from the first minute. Institutionally, the teacher occupies a particular position within the room; relationally, that position does not remove them from the event. It places them inside it.

This is easily misheard as an accusation, and it is not one.

It does not say that teachers cause everything that happens in their classrooms. That would merely swap one fantasy of control for a crueller one. The distinction is between participation and causation. That you were there does not mean you caused it. That you didn't cause it does not mean you weren't there. The teacher responded, waited, pursued one thing, abandoned another, laughed, grew irritated, ignored something, noticed something else, and each of those became part of what everyone else then encountered and answered.

Nor does doing nothing provide an exit. The teacher waits, stays silent, looks elsewhere, lets a remark pass, carries on with the handout. But the silence is heard. The glance elsewhere is seen. The remark allowed to pass is experienced as having been allowed. Watzlawick and his colleagues made it an axiom that one cannot not communicate.³ In a classroom, the attempt not to participate becomes one more way of participating.

VII. Many Authors

If what each person does, and declines to do, becomes part of what everyone else responds to, then participation is more than presence. It shapes what the event becomes. It is authoring.

The student who asks an unexpected question authors something. The student who derails an activity authors something. The two talking in the corner author something. The one who says nothing all lesson authors something too, because the silence is there for everyone else to meet. And the teacher authors constantly, in every pursuit and every refusal, whether they would choose to or not. Because there is no outside, there is no opting out.

A lesson has many authors. This is not a gentle metaphor for collaboration. It describes how the lesson comes to exist at all. Nobody needs permission to author it; being in the room is enough. Nobody holds the manuscript, nobody knows the ending, and nobody authors it alone.

There is something worth recovering here from the word authority itself. It comes to English through Latin auctoritas, from auctor: an originator, maker, founder, one who brings something about - the same ancestry from which we get author.⁴ Authority has long since acquired the language of command, ownership, and the right to compel. Relational Authority is not an attempt to put an alpha figure back at the centre of the classroom. It is a return to authorship. Relational Authority is not about who controls the classroom. It is about how thirty different but necessarily interrelated acts of authorship become one lesson.

This is also why the grant is a different thing. Every student authors the lesson without anyone's leave. The grant concerns something narrower: the weight the teacher's authoring is allowed to carry, and whether what the teacher says and does is given enough significance to turn what happens next. The teacher is always one of the authors. What the grant determines is how far that authorship can give direction.

VIII. Not the Same Lesson

Teachers say it all the time: They were like a completely different class today.

Perhaps we should take them literally enough to notice what they have seen.

The same students on Tuesday are not the same event as those students on Thursday. Something happened before class. Someone is exhausted. Someone fell out with a friend at lunch. A joke that was well received last week is received differently now, or not at all, and an activity that worked beautifully yesterday, today falls completely flat. Somebody says something nobody said last time. And the teacher arrives differently too, carrying a different morning, a different patience, a different attention. Nobody has become a different person. The configuration has changed, and the configuration is the event.

The same teacher can walk into the same room, with the same students, the same materials, the same topic, even the same lesson plan. Something will happen. It will not be the same lesson.

That tutor was right - a plan can be ruined. A plan can also be repeated: photocopied, filed, taught again next year. The lesson cannot. It existed only in what passed among those people, in that room, at that hour - and once it has happened, it cannot be played back.

A lesson is an event. This one happened once, and it will never happen again.

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Notes

1. Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science” (“Del rigor en la ciencia”), first published 1946; collected in El hacedor (1960). English translation in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Viking, 1998).

2. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), ch. V, “Action”. Arendt's account links the unpredictability of action to plurality and the web of human relationships.

3. Paul Watzlawick, Janet Helmick Beavin and Don D. Jackson, Pragmatics of Human Communication (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967), ch. 2. Their first metacommunicational axiom is that one cannot not communicate; activity, inactivity, speech and silence can all have communicative value.

4. Authority derives via Old French from Latin auctoritas, itself from auctor; author derives from the same Latin auctor, with senses including originator, creator, founder and one who brings something about.

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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.