What are you waiting on?

I have been considering this question off and on for the last weeks. The near cause is our toddler, whose waking schedule has been unpredictable. My usual morning habit (“coffee and contemplation”, as Stranger Things taught us) isn’t usual anymore, because whatever I am doing in the morning, I am also keeping an ear open for his stirring.

I’m not fully present in the task at hand, at least not the way I used to be. I’ve always got my figurative eye on the door, because I know something more important’s about to come through. It’s not like I’m NOT focused. But the focus is…different.

I wonder if we’re not all to some degree waiting on something. I’ve waited tables too, twice in my life. Both times I was pretty good at it, once I’d mastered some of the vicissitudes (don’t serve from the dessert tray, for example – pro tip). When things got busy, I remember being completely absorbed in what I was doing: no bandwidth left in active working memory for anything but who is having what and where they are in their meal.

I also remember that “waiting” has a companion word, “attending,” that trails its own attractive history. I learned a powerful meaning of the word at the med school. Everyone there knew exactly where they stood in the pecking order in any given room, from the lowly first-year student to the glorious attending physicians (medicine is like the Navy, without the gold braid). The “attending” physicians outranked the “residents,” terms left over from when junior physicians lived in the hospital for round-the-clock care and senior physicians lived off-site, but came in on announced rounds to check on what the residents were doing and teach from the patients. They literally “attended” the hospital, while the residents lived there.

Despite the history, those titles still impart the sense that the attending knows what to watch for in a way the residents don’t. The expert  will “pay attention,” as the overused phrase says. Experience has taught her to bring exactly the right focus to exactly the right things. She won’t miss what matters most because it isn’t in the place where you usually look for it. And she’ll grill the residents on what their attentions have missed, to ensure they never do that again.

The attending physician will pay attention to the patient, of course, but only as part of a larger pattern. I’ll always remember a senior physician telling me that a doc’s career is really a forty-year relationship with “the lesion.” Patients come and go, but the focus of a specialist – the tumor, the organ, the syndrome – is always present in each of them, ever mutating and concatenating and teaching the physician what else it can be. Docs care about patients, yes – but their attention is always divided, necessarily. They see more of us – and less – because their eye is always on the door, waiting.

If we are all waiting on something, I wonder how what we are waiting on forms us. My waiting on my toddler can form me into a frustrated, resentful mess (we’re being honest here), or it can call me into a new level of attending to the immediacy and in-the-moment joy that children bring. Up to me.

My Facebook feed teaches me, through a glass darkly, what my best friends from high school and college are waiting on. Some are waiting on relationships; others on new job opportunities; some on their next gig, or the next edition of their favorite comic, or the next chance to share a photo of how well they are eating. These are all great things to wait on. They show me the range of ways that the door we are watching affects the way we find our way through the day at hand: what we notice, what we miss, what we invent from whole cloth because we want so badly for it to be there.

Well, I wait on students, and I wonder what all this waiting-thought means for teachers. It’s the first week of classes, for me and so many others. A magical time, liminal and scary. And I’m once again wondering at the weird energy of this work we teachers do.

How in order to teach well, I need an abiding love for my subject and the dynamics of bringing the stuff I’ve spent decades with to folks encountering it for the first time. My students come and go, but my “lesion” (benign one, at that) remains: the daily work of connecting to ideas in ways that both sustain me and are accessible and relevant to new arrivals to the field.

How the work is not about identifying “little me’s” and teaching them the way I wish I’d been taught, even though desire for that kind of connection to students springs eternal. We always hope we are seeing the glimmer of potential brilliance in our students – mirrors of ourselves (because of course we are brilliant). But that’s a fool’s errand, and a speedy ticket to teaching in ways that don’t reach anyone but the (very scarce) “little you” out there.

The wonder of teaching – the nutritive core – is in the dazzling difference of people: how many ways there are to be a person before you show up to learn this curriculum, and its cascading, everchanging impact in everyone’s life as they learn it now.

Of course, if you see that difference in your class, you’re obligated to act on it, O master teacher. Perhaps your prep was for naught, because the students found something else in the reading and that’s where you need to go. This way of working isn’t for the teacher who thinks that the seventh year through a class means “the work is done” and the job is just pressing play on the stories and jokes that wowed ‘em last year. Use the experience, sure, but be ready to abandon it when it’s revealed as old news. As Roy Batty taught, Wake up: time to die.

So that’s what I’m waiting on as another semester begins (even as I wait on the baby stirring in the other room, right now). I’m waiting on the surprise that derails my prep and upends my certainty that I have a “good class” ready to go.

Stephen Sondheim isn’t a teacher, primarily, but he taught me this about what matters:

Something to sit in your chair and ruin your sleep,
And makes you aware of being alive.

Oh, and this:

Anything you do
Let it come from you
Then it will be new
Give us more to see.

Let’s wait on what’s worth waiting for, today and every day we are privileged to teach. Have a great year, everyone.

Picture of Roy Batty from “Blade Runner” here, with thanks. I know I just mentioned him in passing, but he’s a lot more fun to look at than pictures of “waiting” (clocks, doors, ho hum) and might even pull in some of those Facebook friends, for whom “Blade Runner” is a sacred text.