✏️ Teaching & Habitual Re-Creation
How my first semester of teaching began with a crisis of creativity.
How do you plan to teach writing? This post continues a series on lesson planning, which started with "101 Random Lesson Plans." The next post will be "How to Lesson Plan Once (And Never Again)."
habitual re-creation: verb. 1. the act of repeatedly creating what one has already created, 2. perpetually starting from scratch, 3. the failure to embrace templates, 4. the failure to learn
“She knows there's no success like failure/ And that failure's no success at all.” Bob Dylan, Love Minus Zero / No Limits
I. My First Semester Crisis
A late Sunday night in September 2013.
Crickets sang as a soft breeze moved through an open window, fluttering the blinds with a metallic rattle. Tall grass bent and danced. I stared at my computer, eyes straining. Soft thunder boomed in the distance like a timpani, barely audible.
The caret blinked on a white word processing screen. Blink, blink, blink, like the seconds hand of a clock. Tick, tick, tick. Time passed. The screen remained blank.
I sighed, laying my forehead on my desk in resignation. What was I teaching tomorrow? My mind flashed back to the prior week when lack of classroom management and creativity converged.
As I explained the day's objectives, a student interrupted, "Your class is so boring. We just do the same things every day."
"No, we don't," I stammered. "Today we're reading—"
She fired back. "We read different stories, but keep doing the same things. It's so boring. I know this is your first year and all, but you're a terrible teacher."
You know, I probably was.
Lightning illuminated the sky without a sound.
I understood the problem: I was boring. My teaching lacked variety. And so my teaching books spread and stacked across my desk. I was searching. I needed examples. I needed variety. Just something.
I was locked in a state of habitual re-creation, where, despite hours planning, I kept re-creating the same activities day after day, week after week. This extended past routine. She was right. I kept trying for different but kept creating the same over and over again. What a failure.
I stared at my teaching books. Despite hundreds and hundreds of pages talking about teaching, they lacked concrete examples. I had passion, but not much else.
If only I had examples. If only I had examples. If only.
II. From Recipes to References (Where Teacher’s Education Fails)
Chefs have cookbooks, builders have blueprints, musicians have sheet music, and quilters have patterns, but teachers? They start with nothing.
Consider cooking. Anyone can find cookbooks in bookstore or recipes online. While good cooks start with fresh ingredients from scratch, cooking doesn't mean inventing recipes from scratch each time.
Yet if cooking were teaching, aspiring chefs would write fifteen pages about the history of cinnamon before being allowed near a kitchen. (They may never bake, by the way!) They’d barely cook before being thrust into a hostile environment with combative customers.
Consider building. Your local home improvement store—or grocery store, even—might feature magazines with dream cabin blueprints. Without studying architecture, any stranger can browse blueprints and dream about houses they’ll never build.
Yet if building were teaching, construction workers and architects alike would write fifteen pages about the growth cycle of trees before being allowed near a hammer. They'd be certified without ever practicing designing houses, yet somehow safety would still matter.
While books on teaching, content, and teaching content exist, few model planning. Many books talk about planning without plans, remaining so general that adaptation becomes problematic. Many teachers therefore start without precedent, creating the wheel from scratch. As routine settles, they habitually re-create the same lessons day after day, week after week, and year after year.
Say you fancy some curry. You don't start by inventing a recipe. Instead you research recipes, compare them, and follow one. If it works, you try it again. If it fails, you reflect and try a new approach. Yet if this were teaching, you'd only find articles about curries. No action steps. You'd certainly never find a general cookbook with starting points.
Recipes offer more than recipes: They offer templates. Experience internalizes patterns and precedent becomes starting point. (With time, all recipes become references.) Creativity doesn't mean starting from nothing, but moving from learning conventions to breaking conventions. Without pattern recognition, individual actions require intense forethought.
Consider the athlete learning a new skill. At first, learning requires hours of concentration and repetition, moving the motion from conscious thought to unconscious action. In the same way, as new skills become routine, time and strategy shift from the short term to the long term.
Other professions require on-the-job training. Teaching follows suit, but through omission. Yes, teaching programs require observing classrooms and student teaching, but with little relevant transfer. While teachers learn through reflection, teacher’s education denies that experience. The preparation mismatches future demands, like training for cross country by playing golf.
Note: I'm critiquing institutions and processes here, not people. I love essays as both medium and art from. Yet writing an essay is not writing a parent email. As for me, having devoured many books on teaching, I suffered mental indigestion. I had whats without whys, knowing specific things without mental models to organize them.
Comparing my experiences to others, teacher's education fails by design for several reasons.
One, teacher’s education cannot predict every particular of every position. Will you teach in an urban or rural setting? Will your school have funding? Will you need a second job to make ends meet? Will you start with helpful guidance? Will you have supportive principals and parents? What fads become chains?
Since these concretes can't be predicted, training remains abstract. General. Preparing for all situations means preparing for nothing.
Two, teacher’s education cannot escape its own classroom context. Rather than prepare with teacher things, it demands student things. This forces on the job training by omission. So when you start teaching without being fully prepared, the consequences feel quick, severe, and unforgiving. You study teaching without practicing teaching.
Maybe this makes sense: Being a student of teaching isn’t being a teacher of students. Each requires a different skill set. Reworded, we might get this: Teaching teaches teachers to teach. All else is studying school.
There's an irony here: If teaching teaches teachers to teach, it's without other teachers. Schools may assign newer teachers "mentors," but unless they physically observe the classroom, new teachers learn without help. Sink or swim. Their carpet square represents unexplored territory. New schools may as well be new countries. Every "lesson" happens nested within classes, within schools, and within communities.
And let's face it: Not every teacher fits every school. That's okay.
Let's meander a little.
What do you teach? It depends on the students, frankly. Good plans fit the audience. And if the audience won't cooperate, good plans fail.
Mentor teachers may give advice on shared students, but that doesn't always translate. Not every student behaves the same in every situation. Change the context, change the outcome. Just like we behave differently in different social situations, students are no different. Thus, even advice from fellow teachers about the same students often falls flat. So plans fail for other reasons.
Of course, daily lesson plans join a constellation of paperwork. A robust checklist might include long range planning, lesson plans, speaking notes, visual aids, assignments, and so on. If you take the reflective path, you can fill notebooks with careful observations on whether something worked or not. That said, lesson plans just form one focal point.
Aside: Some districts micromanage with startling efficiency, creating the opposite problem. No planning required. Teachers function like happy little cogs as everyone reads the same sanitized scripts. Both teachers and students alike become interchangeable parts, square pegs forced through round holes. The map becomes the territory through sheer force. Apply the Chinese Room to teaching: When everything is scripted—from teaching to possible student responses—who does the thinking? Who's the robot? In this inverted scenario (with no planning), the fetish for sameness means teaching individuals through groupthink. Forced happy.
And so teachers begin their careers creating and re-creating otherwise predictable activities. Teachers start with blank pages—no recipes, no blueprints, and no entrance ramps.
And so I sat, resigned, with my forehead on my desk, wishing for better examples. Something like a recipe book. Ideals without logistics are empty.
III. The Thought Experiment (Part 1)
Months later, as December dawned, I grew more desperate. Still boring. Just months earlier, as my teaching program ended, I felt like I could do anything. Now, I could do nothing. And certainly nothing right. I just needed examples.
This time I stared at a blank notebook page, determined to solve this problem. My brain was swimming in a chaotic and combustible mix. Something was on the tip of my tongue, but I wasn't sure what. If I struggled lesson planning so much, what if I lesson planned once and never again?
What a stupid question! Then again, why not?
Exasperated, I scrawled the question across a blank page: What if I listen planned once and never again?
But before starting in earnest, I wanted to walk around the problem...
To be continued in "How to Lesson Plan Once (And Never Again)."
New to the blog? Explore some other favorites!
✏️ Need a place to start? Check out my ongoing series, Teach Writing Tomorrow.
📓 Want other tips for teaching writing? Check out some fan favorites.
🏆 And here are some other popular posts:
🗞️ Crave honest education news? Check out same satire from The Honest School Times.
