I spend a lot of every weekday in a school—which is, among other things, a workplace. That means I see a lot of people every day. Some of them are people I regard as friends, and greet them as such (with all the gradations the term "friend" implies). Others are acquaintances, with whom I exchange a polite hello, and with whom I may speak if there is a specific reason to do so, whether as a matter of work, shared interest, or circumstance. Still others are people I don't know formally, though I recognize them by face and with whom I may exchange a nod of acknowledgement. It's one of the wrinkles of the workday that these may be people whose paths I seem to cross all the time, and whose names I don't actually know, while there I those I know and like that I see relatively infrequently. But under normal circumstances, there's something pleasant, almost musical, of literally facing the interplay of other members of a community in classrooms, hallways, and other shared spaces.
It so happens that most of the people in my workplace are adolescents, which is a peculiar pleasure and challenge—including the challenge of looking in the mirror each day. In many of their faces, especially the ninth graders, the outlines of childhood are still readily discernible. In others, I can see the outlines of old age. In part, that's because there are a series of templates into which students, among others, situate themselves in terms of their taste in clothing, jewelry, and other signifiers (like sweatshirts that advertise locations along with their tanned skins). I don't claim any certainty about this, of course, and I'm aware that I won't be around to verify the imagined outcomes—outcomes shaped as much by historical precedents than future projections, reflecting my belief that there are continuities in feature and expression that change relatively little over the course of generations.
There are other things I see in the faces I see every day. Beauty. Intelligence. Worry. Confidence. Warmth. Severity. It can sometimes be startling to realize that at any given time on any given day these visages can shift their shape with a smile, the expression of one’s eyes, or in a conversation out of earshot, but that’s precisely because faces do seem to have an essential character that maintain an essential element of continuity. And yet there are other kinds of character that evolve over time—experience, or lack thereof—that silently define a personality.
There remains so much I don't know. Part of my job, a job at a private school where parents are paying for a degree of personalization, is to know who my students are, and I think I do in fact perform reasonably well in calibrating the way I address and respond to them, even as another part of my job is socializing them by eliciting, and demonstrating, shared standards of expectation and conduct. For me, it's navigating those gaps, far more than mastering and delivering content, that keeps my job interesting. It's also the part of the job that's most mysterious, because I know I'm only dealing with tips of icebergs.
One line that's a standard part of my pedagogic repertoire is "Life is an existential state of incomplete information." If we always knew everything we needed or wanted to know, important decisions would be a lot easier than they often are. Education is a matter of mastering the skills of guesswork by gaining proficiency in collecting relevant evidence, drawing reasonable inferences, and formulating efficacious judgments. In short, education is learning how to read.
For me, that work begins and ends every day with reading faces. It's the guesswork that keeps me alive.