My Secret Public Journal

When I think about the difference between working at Roi S. Wood and working at the high school, the distinction that keeps returning to me is the difference between a family and a village.

I loved working at Roi. For sixteen years, it was the place where I spent the majority of my professional life, long enough that its rhythms became almost inseparable from my understanding of what it meant to go to work. It was not idyllic. Calling it a family means accepting all that the metaphor implies: affection and irritation, loyalty and conflict, accumulated grievances and shared histories, people who knew too much about one another and nevertheless continued showing up for one another. There was dysfunction because families are often dysfunctional. But beneath it was genuine care.

The high school feels different.

I do not mean colder. In fact, I have been struck by how welcoming people have been and by how quickly I have begun to feel that I belong there. The difference is structural. Roi felt like a community. The high school feels like a community composed of communities. It is less like entering another household than entering a village.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Children’s Games gives me a way to visualize what I am beginning to understand.

Painted in 1560, the enormous panel contains more than 200 children engaged in more than 80 recognizable games (Orrock, 2012). They occupy streets, buildings, courtyards, and open spaces. Some play alone. Others work in pairs. Still others form circles, teams, processions, competitions, and temporary alliances. Although the children share a common physical environment, they are not all doing the same thing or even participating in the same social world.

The longer I look at the painting, the less it looks like chaos.

It is crowded, certainly. But each small cluster possesses its own order.

A game has rules.

It has expectations.

It distinguishes participants from spectators. It establishes what movements are permissible, what counts as success, whose turn comes next, and what happens when someone violates the rules. Those expectations may never be written down. The children know them because they have learned the game.

That is what I am beginning to see at the high school.

There is one Joplin High School, but there are many ways of inhabiting it.

There are departments, hallways, offices, programs, extracurricular groups, friendship networks, administrative relationships, veteran employees, new employees, counselors, teachers, support staff, coaches, and students. Some of these communities are formally constituted by the organizational chart. Others exist almost entirely through relationships. Some overlap heavily. Others seem to occupy the same building while rarely encountering one another.

Each possesses, to varying degrees, its own culture.

Sociology gives me useful language for describing what I am observing. William Graham Sumner used the term folkways to describe customary patterns of behavior that emerge through repeated social practice. He distinguished these from mores, norms that become invested with stronger moral meaning and social obligation (Sumner, 1906). Folkways help determine how people ordinarily behave; mores help establish what a community believes people ought to do. Neither necessarily requires a written rule. Informal norms are often learned through observation, imitation, socialization, and the experience of what happens when someone violates them.

Schools are saturated with such norms.

Some are obvious. Others are almost invisible.

Where do people sit during meetings? Who stops to talk in a particular hallway? Is it normal to walk into a colleague’s classroom, or is the doorway treated as a boundary? Which problems are handled through email, and which require a face-to-face conversation? How quickly is one expected to respond? When does a complaint remain private, and when does it become communal? Who gets asked for advice even though no organizational chart assigns that person an advisory role? What happens when someone is having a bad day? Who notices? Who responds?

None of these questions appears especially important by itself. Collectively, however, they describe the social architecture of an institution.

At Roi, I had inhabited that architecture for so long that much of it had disappeared from my conscious awareness.

I knew the games.

I knew who talked to whom. I understood histories that did not have to be explained. I knew when a colleague’s complaint was serious and when it was simply the ritualized grumbling that accompanies any workplace. I understood personalities, alliances, wounds, loyalties, and humor accumulated across years. I knew what could be said, how it could be said, and to whom it could be said. Much of that knowledge was never taught to me explicitly. I acquired it by living there.

Eventually, culture begins to feel like common sense.

That may be one of culture’s most powerful characteristics. Folkways are easiest to identify when they are not our own. Once they have been thoroughly internalized, they no longer feel like conventions at all. They simply feel like the way things are done.

My move to the high school disrupted that familiarity.

Suddenly I became aware again of the existence of unwritten rules.

I am not entirely an outsider. I have worked for the district for many years. I know many people in the building. I understand the institutional language, the broader district culture, and the professional world of public education. Yet I am also new enough to the daily life of the high school that many of its norms remain visible to me.

That creates a fascinating sociological position.

I am being socialized into a new community while possessing enough professional and academic experience to notice that socialization occurring.

My doctorate in educational leadership has become unexpectedly relevant here, although not because I view myself as entering the building as a leader. That is an important distinction for me. I am wary of language that transforms ordinary participation into some subtle form of leadership—the idea that because I understand organizations I must therefore be exerting “quiet influence” over them. Such language can flatter the observer into believing that understanding a system somehow places one above it.

It does not.

My education has not placed me outside the system. It has given me a set of intellectual tools for thinking about systems while I remain fully embedded within one.

I prefer to think of this as a kind of systems literacy.

Educational leadership introduced me to organizational culture, systems thinking, institutional structures, formal and informal authority, communication, change, and the complicated relationship between individuals and institutions. Doctoral study deepened that disposition. Research training taught me to resist premature explanations, to look for patterns without assuming that the first pattern I notice is necessarily the correct one, and to remain conscious of the position from which I am interpreting what I see.

Those tools are useful.

They are not omniscience.

Someone who has spent twenty years in one department knows things about that community that I do not know. A secretary understands networks of information that may remain invisible to me. A counselor encounters a version of the high school different from the one I experience. A custodian sees the building at hours and under circumstances that fundamentally alter its social geography. Administrators occupy another position. Students move through still others.

There is not one high school available to be observed.

There are many high schools superimposed upon the same building.

This is where Bruegel becomes especially helpful. From the elevated perspective he gives the viewer, we can see numerous games at once. We can survey the square. We can notice patterns that no individual child within the painting could possibly perceive.

But none of the children has Bruegel’s perspective.

Each inhabits the painting locally.

The child playing one game sees that game, the nearby players, perhaps several neighboring groups, and only a small portion of the enormous social field visible to us. The total composition belongs to the viewer, not to the participants.

My academic training sometimes allows me to imagine that elevated perspective. Systems thinking asks me to step conceptually backward and look for relationships among parts. Instead of asking only why one person behaved a certain way, I can ask about the structures, histories, incentives, norms, relationships, and feedback loops surrounding the behavior.

That is useful because schools invite simple explanations.

A student is unmotivated.

A teacher is resistant.

A department does not communicate.

Administration made a decision.

Someone failed to follow through.

Systems thinking complicates those statements. It asks what else is operating. What structural conditions are present? What competing expectations exist? What history precedes this interaction? What information does each participant possess? Which norms are being followed? Which norms are in conflict? What looks irrational from one location in the system but perfectly rational from another?

Understanding systems has taught me to become suspicious of explanations that depend too heavily upon individual deficiency.

But Bruegel reminds me of the corresponding danger: systems thinking can become so enamored with the view from above that it forgets what life looks like on the ground.

A person is not merely a node in a network.

A department is not merely a subculture.

A hallway is not merely a site of informal socialization.

These are communities inhabited by actual people whose relationships possess histories that cannot be fully represented in a diagram.

There is consequently a kind of uncertainty principle in my present position.

I borrow the term metaphorically rather than scientifically. In quantum mechanics, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle has a precise mathematical meaning that I have no intention of appropriating literally for sociology. What interests me is the image of limits built into observation itself.

To understand the high school, I must become part of it.

But becoming part of it changes what I am able to see.

Right now, I notice certain folkways because I have not yet fully internalized them. I notice where people gather, how groups form, how conversations move, where cultural boundaries seem strong, and where they seem porous. I notice because I still have to interpret.

In another year, I may no longer notice some of these things.

I will know where to sit.

I will know whom to call.

I will understand which hallway conversations are routine.

I will have accumulated enough relational history that behaviors currently requiring interpretation will simply make sense.

That will represent genuine knowledge. Yet something may also be lost.

The better I learn the games, the less conscious I may become that they have rules.

There is no way around that paradox. Complete detachment would preserve my ability to notice difference but prevent genuine belonging. Complete immersion would deepen my lived understanding while making some cultural assumptions increasingly invisible.

To understand the village, I have to live in the village.

And living there changes me.

This is where reflexivity becomes more than an academic concept. Bourdieu’s sociology is particularly useful because it refuses the fantasy that an observer can analyze social life without accounting for the observer’s own social position. We bring histories, dispositions, expectations, and categories of interpretation with us. We do not merely encounter a field; we encounter it through a habitus formed elsewhere (Bourdieu, 1990).

I brought Roi with me to the high school.

Sixteen years in that environment shaped my assumptions about what work feels like, how colleagues relate, how communication happens, what belonging means, and how institutions respond to difficulty. The high school feels different not simply because it objectively is different, but because I am encountering it through a professional self shaped somewhere else.

That recognition matters.

Without it, I could easily mistake difference for deficiency.

I could assume that because a norm at the high school differs from one I knew at Roi, one must be healthier than the other. Sociology offers a better posture. Cultural interpretation requires first understanding practices within the social worlds that produce them.

The family and the village organize belonging differently.

The intimacy of Roi produced what might be called thick relationships. People accumulated extensive histories with one another. Conflict could become intensely personal precisely because relationships were so densely interconnected. Yet those same relationships could sustain extraordinary care. The dysfunction and affection were not opposites. They were often produced by the same social density.

A large high school cannot reproduce that social structure at scale.

Instead, smaller communities form inside it.

This is not necessarily fragmentation. It may be adaptation.

Human beings create manageable social worlds inside institutions too large to experience as intimate wholes. Departments develop traditions. Hallways acquire personalities. Colleagues form networks of trust. People find smaller communities in which they are known.

Bruegel’s village works the same way.

The children do not need everyone in the painting to participate in their game. They need enough people who understand its rules.

That distinction helps me reconsider the cliques I see throughout a large school. “Clique” is often used pejoratively, as though any close subgroup automatically represents exclusion. Sometimes it does. Groups can certainly become closed, territorial, or suspicious of outsiders. But grouping itself is not pathological. Communities require boundaries of some kind. Belonging depends partly upon recognizing a “we.”

The more useful question is what kind of boundary a group maintains.

Is it a doorway or a wall?

Can people move between communities?

Does information cross the boundary?

Are outsiders regarded with curiosity, indifference, or hostility?

Can someone belong to several communities simultaneously?

Does loyalty within the group require suspicion of those outside it?

Those questions shift attention away from whether subgroups should exist and toward how they relate to the larger system.

Etienne Wenger’s concept of communities of practice is useful here. People who engage in sustained shared work develop not merely procedures but languages, repertoires, stories, assumptions, and practices. Much professional knowledge is acquired by participating in such communities rather than by reading formal instructions. A new teacher learns what it means to work in a department partly through the department itself. The rules are transmitted socially (Wenger, 1998).

That is another reason the games in Bruegel’s painting resonate with me.

Children learn games by playing them.

Someone explains a rule. Someone imitates another person. Someone makes a mistake and gets corrected. Someone tests a boundary. Someone discovers that one group plays the game slightly differently from another. Competence develops through participation.

Organizations work similarly.

The employee handbook may describe formal norms, but it cannot teach the complete culture of an institution.

Edgar Schein’s model of organizational culture helps articulate why. Culture operates at multiple levels. There are visible artifacts: schedules, meeting structures, classroom arrangements, rituals, language, and procedures. There are espoused values: the things an institution says it believes. Then there are deeper underlying assumptions—the expectations so thoroughly embedded that members may rarely articulate them (Schein & Schein, 2017).

A school can therefore be read at several levels simultaneously.

What does it say?

What does it do?

What does it assume?

The gaps among those questions are often more revealing than any one answer.

Again, I do not mean that I stand outside the high school conducting an organizational diagnosis. I am not an anthropologist who has arrived to study an unfamiliar tribe, and my colleagues are not specimens. I am one of them.

That point is ethically important.

Academic language can create distance. Terms such as habitus, subculture, social capital, normative structure, and organizational ecology can illuminate human experience, but they can also abstract people into concepts. My doctorate gives me a vocabulary; it does not give me ownership of other people’s meanings.

The challenge is to use theory without allowing theory to replace relationship.

That tension is especially visible in ISD.

Within the larger village of the high school, I am participating in the formation of another small social world. ISD has formal expectations, of course, but the room is also developing its own folkways. There is a rhythm to the day. There are routines surrounding academic work, breaks, food, conversation, reflection, and circle. There are emerging expectations about what it means to be present, respectful, responsible, and prepared to reflect and reenter.

Some of these began as structures I introduced.

But a structure is not yet a culture.

Culture begins when members begin to anticipate the structure, interpret it, negotiate it, and eventually participate in sustaining it.

When students begin asking whether we are going to have circle at the end of the day, something sociologically interesting has occurred. Circle is no longer simply an activity placed on my schedule. It has acquired shared meaning. A practice originally introduced through formal authority has begun moving toward a folkway of the room.

That does not mean every student values it equally. It does not mean the culture is complete or stable. Cultures are always contested. Norms are tested precisely because people have agency.

But it demonstrates that even a small room inside a much larger institution can become a community with its own normative expectations.

The more interesting question is what happens when students cross between these communities.

A student may move through several normative worlds before arriving in ISD.

There is the culture of the home.

There is the peer group.

There is the hallway.

There is the classroom.

There may be athletics, band, clubs, work, social media, or other communities whose expectations matter deeply.

Then the student enters my room.

Behavior that carries social capital in one setting may produce sanctions in another. Humor celebrated among friends may be experienced as disrespect in a classroom. Defiance that preserves status within a peer group may conflict directly with institutional expectations. Silence may communicate cooperation in one environment and hostility in another.

A student is therefore not simply choosing whether to “follow the rules.”

The student is navigating intersecting normative systems.

This does not eliminate responsibility. Sociology need not dissolve agency into structure. It does, however, complicate the moral simplicity with which institutions sometimes interpret behavior.

That complication is familiar to me from educational leadership and systems thinking. Individuals act, but they act within environments. Environments constrain possibilities without completely determining them. Systems shape behavior while being continuously reshaped by the people operating inside them.

The games exist because children keep playing them.

The children learn how to play because the games already exist.

Neither can be understood entirely without the other.

That reciprocal relationship is perhaps what fascinates me most about my current transition.

I am learning the high school at the same time that my presence is becoming part of the high school.

Every relationship I develop changes my position in its social network. Every routine that becomes established in ISD adds another small practice to the institution. Every interaction teaches me something about the culture while simultaneously contributing to it.

There is no neutral place from which to observe this.

I am one of the variables.

That realization produces humility rather than authority.

My doctorate does not make me the person standing above Bruegel’s square who can identify what everyone else is doing. It may help me recognize that the square contains many games. It may give me theoretical frameworks for asking why groups form, how norms develop, how structures interact, and how individuals learn to navigate institutions.

But I remain somewhere in the painting.

My view is local.

My interpretation is provisional.

Other people can see things that I cannot.

Some of what I currently believe I understand will undoubtedly change as relationships deepen and histories become known to me. Some things that appear unusual today will become ordinary. Other patterns that are presently invisible may reveal themselves only after months or years.

Perhaps that is the most valuable thing my education has taught me about systems: not that they can be mastered, but that they deserve intellectual humility.

A system as complex as a high school cannot be reduced to an organizational chart, a mission statement, a set of policies, or even a particularly sophisticated theory. It exists in the continual interaction between those formal structures and thousands of human relationships.

It is lived before it is analyzed.

At Roi, I spent enough years inside one community that I eventually knew many of its rules without remembering when I learned them. I knew the family through participation, history, affection, conflict, and time.

At the high school, I am learning something different.

I am learning how to live in the village.

Bruegel’s Children’s Games helps me accept the complexity of that task. The painting does not resolve its hundreds of figures into one activity. It allows multiplicity to remain visible. The square holds dozens of games without ceasing to be one square. Individual groups maintain their own practices without ceasing to occupy a shared community. Order exists, but it is distributed.

Perhaps that is what I am beginning to recognize in the high school.

There is no single game to learn.

There are many.

Some I will participate in directly. Some I will encounter only at their edges. Some I may never understand completely. Over time, I will become more fluent in the folkways of the building and more aware of the mores that bind its communities together. I will learn where boundaries lie and where they can be crossed. I will develop relationships that make the village less abstract and more personal.

And, inevitably, the village will become less visible to me as a sociological phenomenon because it will increasingly become home.

For now, though, I occupy an unusual moment between unfamiliarity and belonging.

I can still see many of the games.

My education gives me language for thinking about why they matter. My experience reminds me that theories are never substitutes for the people who live them. My position inside the system prevents me from pretending that I can ever see the complete picture.

I am not standing at Bruegel’s window looking down upon the village.

I am somewhere in the square.

I am learning the games.

And perhaps the most responsible thing I can do with the tools my education has given me is not to imagine that I understand the whole village, but to remain curious about the part of it I can see, attentive to the parts I cannot, and conscious that every day I spend here changes both my understanding of the community and my place within it.

References

Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice (R. Nice, Trans.). Stanford University Press. (Original work published 1980).

Orrock, A. (2012). Homo ludens: Pieter Bruegel’s Children’s Games and the humanist educators. Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, 4(2). https://doi.org/10.5092/jhna.2012.4.2.1

Schein, E. H., & Schein, P. A. (2017). Organizational culture and leadership (5th ed.). Wiley.

Sumner, W. G. (1906). Folkways: A study of the sociological importance of usages, manners, customs, mores, and morals. Ginn and Company.

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge University Press.