I was talking to a friend about teaching in Oman and trying to find the right metaphor. The usual comparisons: teachers as parent, as coach, as conductor couldn’t convey my exact meaning. Then I realized that teacher as conductor didn’t work because it was too constrictive – the players have to follow the music and what the person in front is signaling. That doesn’t give the necessary leeway for a positive classroom atmosphere.

But conducting a jazz symphony works. It gives the idea of someone basically in change but ready to let others take the lead and change direction if necessary; if the oboes feel the need to do a solo riff, then off they go. The conductor walks in with a musical score and general sense of how things should proceed, but also needs to be ready for the swerve.

There are days I walk into a classroom and everyone is ‘off’ – tired, cranky, silent. Sometimes there is a reason (an important football match the night before), sometimes it just happens and I need to readjust like a quarterback calling an audible. Suddenly I will decide that we are starting with group work or I might try to tease them into getting organized; sometimes I have to roll with it and try to do all the heavy lifting or give students a choice of different activities.

Or sometimes I walk in and there’s a manic energy, as if everyone had a few espressos for breakfast. Then I need to try to harness that liveliness into productive discussions.

A regular conductor knows exactly how they want the music to sound, but with a jazz symphony, you never know what is going to happen. Even after twenty-five years of teaching, I can still be knocked off balance. Once a student’s phone rang and they said, “I have to take this call.” I remember standing there utterly blank for a moment, wondering what to do. The student seemed serious, but letting a student leave class to talk on the phone was, for me, a dangerous precedent to set.

I was stuck. According to my rules, I should have said, “if you leave class, I will mark you absent.” But the student was asking permission in a straight-forward way, I felt (although I had no way to prove this) that there was an emergency and there had not been any negative behavior in that class.

After a few seconds of silence, I nodded and said, “OK.” I did not feel comfortable yet I thought I was making the right choice for that moment. I braced myself for fallout however, the student came back in after a few moments and no other students asked to leave for the rest of the semester.

Sometimes the best way to lead people is to let them do what they want.