I write tonight because that once familiar restlessness has returned, that urge to create beyond the routines of my thinking job. I have many creative hobbies (I love the painting and music) but writing stimulates in a way the others do not.
Part of this restlessness comes from something we don’t admit to jobsworth inspectors: teaching is a craft built on constant, unavoidable failure. Not dramatic failure or notable collapse, but a steady, baked-in shortfall. Every lesson is constrained by time, and literature requires more time than the clock ever allows. Every hour in the classroom is a negotiation between what you want to say and what you can reasonably offer. Your class walks out of the room knowing what almost landed and what slipped out of reach. At times I feel that shortfall physically, a tightening in the chest, a flicker of irritation, a small surge of energy that has nowhere to go.
A recent lesson I taught on descriptive writing reminded me of this. We looked at Munch’s The Scream alongside a photograph of a student crying, exploring how different mediums capture the emotional charge of a first day. For the first time in my career, nearly all the students chose the photograph as the more effective image. Perhaps they preferred its clarity and literalness, and that preference is fair enough. Yet it felt like a small failure to me, not because they were wrong, but because the deeper imaginative leap, the one where distortion reveals a sharper truth, did not resonate for them in that moment. There was nothing catastrophic about the lesson. It simply left a residue of “not quite.”
In the same week I gave a different group an unseen poem about the quiet suffering that often shadows high-achieving students. Some days later, one student approached me to say the poem moved them. That single word did not undo the earlier disappointment. It perhaps just meant that my taste in what we do had improved. It meant that something in the poem had passed through the mechanics of the day and they had found it on their terms. It was the kind of moment I want literature to give, that solo plunge through the waterfall where meaning is not observed from a distance but felt from within.
This contrast between the near miss and the sudden connection is what makes the classroom more than a routine. It is also what keeps me writing.
There is always the temptation to step sideways into famous consultancy, to find a role where the performance is smooth, the messaging polished, and the failures less visible. I have met a handful of consultants who are credible and thoughtful, but far more who seem to survive on borrowed ideas and confident gloss. They speak about classrooms the way tourists speak about cities: enthusiastic and far too certain. That path is tricky because too much of teaching’s meaning lies in its imperfections.
I have taught and kept this blog for almost two decades. I could continue as I am, refining familiar systems, repeating successful patterns, and coasting towards retirement. My students achieve excellent results (straight 7s! straight As!). My curriculum is responsive. There is comfort in that stability, but it is not the kind of comfort I seem able to sit with. Restlessness, in its better form, is a sign of life. It keeps me honest.
So I begin to write again, partly for those beginning the curricular journeys I teach, partly for the colleagues who still believe in vocation even when they distrust the word, and partly (mostly?) for myself. I want to keep reaching for the moments when something lands, when a text stirs a student, when a lesson that could have been routine becomes something alive. Why? Let’s find out.
The tropical heat around me now is a long way from the frozen northern nights when I carried home my early failures. Man, those cold evenings where the classroom experience existed alone. Comfort and suffering can both dull the senses.
So it feels like time to wake up again, to make a craft worth our relentless, beautiful shortcomings.
