Wow, what a day.
Kelli and I went to the Arden Fair this past weekend, something we usually do every year around this time. I expected the familiar rhythm of wandering through the booths, listening to music, finding something good to eat, and running into a few people we knew.
This year turned into something else entirely.
It seemed as though every few minutes, another part of our life in education came walking toward us.
Michelle was one of the first. She had been in my class years ago and immediately started reminiscing about a unit I taught using The Breakfast Club to explore identity, group membership, and the formation of personality.
I remembered the unit, of course. I remembered the film and the multiple discussions that followed it.
What I did not remember was the impact.
Michelle told me those conversations had stayed with her through high school and had helped shape the way she understood her own identity.
That stopped me for a moment.
At the time, I was probably thinking about whether the discussion was going well, whether everyone was participating, whether I had gotten through what I hoped to get through.
I had no idea I was planting something that would still matter thirty years later.
And that became the theme of the day.
Jason came by and laughed about some of the tricks he used to play on teachers, but before long the conversation moved beyond old stories. We talked about the relationship we have maintained over the past twenty or twenty-five years and the way those conversations had helped him make sense of who he was becoming.
We talked with former students who had entered teaching themselves. Some spoke with real satisfaction about the work. Others talked about how difficult the system can be to navigate, even when they still care deeply about students. But they became teachers! How cool is that??
Two parents thanked us for the positive influence we had had on their children in high school, which carried on for years.
Former swimmers and divers stopped by and filled in some of the missing years since we had coached them. There were conversations about careers, marriages, children, losses, hard stretches, and challenges people had somehow found their way through.
Then we ran into Rob, a close colleague from our teaching years who retired five or six years ago. We caught up on his parents, his family, his grandchildren, and the ways life had continued unfolding since those years when we worked side by side.
Standing there at the fair, I had the strange feeling of watching thirty years of life walk past me.
And I found myself thinking about teachers who are just beginning another September.
They cannot see any of this yet.
The Part of Teaching We Cannot See
By the second or third week of school, classrooms begin to change.
The attendance sheet no longer feels quite like a list of strangers.
You begin to know who comes in quietly, who needs reassurance before beginning, who talks before the bell rings, who watches before joining in, and who uses humor to test the room before trusting it.
The class begins to find its rhythm. And I think this is where some of the deepest work of teaching begins.
Not simply instruction. Not simply management. Not even curriculum.
Attention.
Years ago, I wrote about one of my favorite psychology experiments in What Are We Missing? Lessons from the Invisible Gorilla. In the 1999 study by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, participants were asked to watch a short video of people passing basketballs and count the number of passes made by one group. (See video HERE)
It sounds simple enough.
But while people concentrated on counting, a person dressed in a gorilla suit walked directly through the scene, stopped, beat their chest, and continued on.
A surprising number of people never saw the gorilla at all!
Psychologists call this inattentional blindness.
It does not mean people were careless or unintelligent. In fact, most were doing exactly what they had been asked to do. They were paying attention. Just very narrowly.
That is what makes the experiment so powerful.
Sometimes the problem is not that we are failing to pay attention.
Sometimes the problem is that we are paying so much attention to one thing that we no longer notice something else that matters more.
I think schools can create that kind of attention very easily.
We count passes.
- Did I finish the lesson?
- Did I enter the data?
- Did I answer the email?
- Did I cover the standard?
- Did I get through the meeting?
- Did I respond to the parent?
- Did I meet the deadline?
All of those things matter.
But when our attention narrows too far, we can miss the gorilla walking through the room:
The student who is unusually quiet today.
The one who finally raises a hand.
The child who lingers after class because they are trying to find the courage to say something.
The small act of kindness between two students.
The student who suddenly realizes, perhaps for the first time, that an adult in the room genuinely sees them.
We can become so busy attending to what is urgent that we miss what is important.
That is not an argument against planning, standards, accountability, or doing our work well.
It is simply a reminder that the most measurable thing in the room is not always the most meaningful.
What the Years Teach You
One of the gifts of growing older is that the hierarchy of what matters begins to rearrange itself. You remember fewer perfectly executed lessons. You remember more faces. You remember conversations. You remember the student who surprised you, the one you worried about, the one you thought you had not reached.
And every so often, years later, one of them walks toward you at a fair and tells you otherwise.
That is one of the quiet forms of elder wisdom.
Not knowing everything. Certainly not having all the answers. It is simply having lived long enough to see outcomes you could not see when you were standing in the middle of the work.
When I think about Michelle now, I realize something that I could never have known while teaching that Breakfast Club unit.
My work was happening on more than one timeline.
There was the classroom timeline. Forty-five minutes. A lesson objective. A discussion. A bell.
And then there was another timeline I could not see.
A young woman continuing to think about identity.
A student carrying a conversation with her.
Years passing.
A memory remaining.
And eventually, a conversation at the Arden Fair.
Your work is happening on more than one timeline.
I think that may be one of the things I most want younger teachers to understand.
You will see some of your impact immediately. A student understands the concept. A struggling reader improves. A class discussion finally comes alive.
But some of the most meaningful results of teaching are delayed. Sometimes very delayed. You plant something in September and see it grow in October.
You plant something else in September and do not see it again for twenty years.
The Human Rhythm of the Year
Schools have rhythms that calendars do not fully capture.
September feels different from November.
February has its own emotional weather.
May has a rhythm every teacher recognizes in their bones.
And even within September, something shifts after the opening rush.
In The Gift of Being Unscheduled for a While, I reflected on stepping away from the pace of the school year long enough to recover some of our own natural rhythm.
Then, as school approached again, I wrote in Back to School: Holding Steady as the Year Begins about entering the year without allowing its early urgency to carry us away.
Now September asks something slightly different.
Listen.
- What rhythm is this class revealing?
- Who is beginning to trust?
- Who is still standing at the edge?
- Who needs structure?
- Who needs encouragement?
- Who needs time?
- Who needs loved?
This is the inner life of teaching.
It is the part no pacing guide can fully explain because it depends on noticing what is actually happening in front of you.
Presence over performance.
People before systems
.
Systems and souls.
The teacher is always listening for both.
The Seeds We Do Not See
The Arden Fair kept bringing me back to that idea.
A former student talking about identity.
Another remembering relationships.
Parents reflecting on their children’s high school years.
Former athletes speaking about coaching.
Teachers talking about both satisfaction and strain.
A retired colleague catching us up on grandchildren.
Lives unfolding far beyond the walls where we first knew one another.
Somewhere along the way, I found myself thinking about Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians: “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth.”
I have always liked the humility in that image.
We plant. We water. We tend what is in front of us. But we do not control the growth.
Teaching has always felt a little like that to me.
We plant ideas.
We plant confidence.
We plant questions.
We plant a sense of belonging.
Sometimes we plant simply by being steady in someone’s life for a season.
And most of the time, we do not get to stand around and watch what happens next.
There is something freeing in that.
Our responsibility is not to produce every outcome.
Ecclesiastes tells us that there is “a season for every activity under the heavens.”
Perhaps there is also a season for planting whose harvest belongs to another time.
What I Would Say to a Young Teacher This September
If I could sit across from an early-career teacher over coffee right now, I would not tell them that lesson planning does not matter. I would not tell them classroom management does not matter.
It certainly does.
And I would never romanticize the pressures teachers are carrying now. Some systems ask far too much, and no amount of reflection should be used to excuse that.
But I would say this.
Do not judge your influence too soon.
The student who seems indifferent may remember that you greeted them every morning.
The class discussion you thought wandered off course may become the conversation someone carries into adulthood.
The student who tests your patience today may understand your steadiness years from now.
And the young person sitting quietly in the third row may be absorbing far more than you realize.
Your work is happening on more than one timeline.
There is the timeline you live every day.
Bells.
Lessons.
Emails.
Deadlines.
Grades.
Meetings.
And then there is the longer one.
The one most teachers cannot see while they are teaching.
I caught a glimpse of it at the Arden Fair.
Twenty years later. Thirty years later.
A former student walking toward you through a crowd.
A parent stopping to say thank you.
An athlete telling you what those years meant.
A colleague comparing grandchildren.
Someone saying, “I still remember.”
That is one of the gifts of the long view.
You begin to understand that teaching was never only about what happened in the room. It was also about what people carried out of it. So as this year begins to find its rhythm, perhaps the invitation is not to notice everything.
None of us can.
It is simply to resist becoming so busy counting the passes that we miss the people walking right in front of us.
Slow down enough to see.
Pay attention to what matters.
Plant well.
And trust that some of the seeds you are planting now may not reveal themselves for a very long time.
A Few Questions to Carry With You
- What rhythm is this year beginning to reveal?
- Where am I being invited to slow down and notice?
- What early sign of connection have I already seen?
