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Managing Classroom Life

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Understanding the Language Classroom

Abstract

Classroom life is what teachers and learners make it. At the same time, classroom life is what they make of it, and what it makes them. These apparently simple observations capture both the inherent contradictions of classroom life and its complex, systemic nature. As a teacher and teacher-educator living and working with such contradictions, I am concerned with enabling as high a quality of educational experience for my learners as I can in and around both my own and others’ classrooms. However, I know that this is not easily attained; my work is a constant process of adjustment, and any feeling of completion or satisfaction rarely lasts for long. Today’s good educational experience can be tomorrow’s minor disaster. Our actions as teachers can have unintended negative consequences which can cancel out any transitory pedagogic satisfaction we may feel or threaten the sense of security which we and our learners often crave. Uncertainty and even disappointment are facts of life in classrooms. Not everyone sees this in a positive light, though, and one person’s positive experience may be another’s nightmare. Classroom life is thus no more or no less problematical than life itself.

I am very grateful to my colleague Gabi Matei for her helpful comments on an early draft of this chapter, and to the editors for their valuable suggestions and comments on later drafts.

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Authors
  1. Tony Wright
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Leicester, UK

    Simon Gieve

  2. Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

    Inés K. Miller

Copyright information

© 2006 Tony Wright

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Wright, T. (2006). Managing Classroom Life. In: Gieve, S., Miller, I.K. (eds) Understanding the Language Classroom. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230523166_5

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