Ask any coach of a sport that uses a ball and the advice will be the same: keep your eye on the ball. When we take our eye off the ball, we will mishit it, we will miss-stop it. If we take our eye off the ball to see where our opponent is or where our team-mate is running, we are most likely going to miss it. If we lift our head to see where our amazing shot has gone we are more likely going to turn round and see the ball has not moved a fraction! Keep your eye on the ball! It is very simple! Tom Robbins, known for his novels rather than for his sporting ability, went even further when he said, “The trick is this: keep your eye on the ball. Even when you can’t see the ball.”

The advice may be all well and good when there is one ball but what happens when there is more than one ball? There are some incredible juggling records to be found: the most balls juggled at one time is eleven; the longest duration for a person juggling three objects is twelve hours and five minutes; the longest duration for a person juggling three objects blindfolded is twenty two minutes and seven seconds. There are some strange items juggled as well: the Longest Underwater Juggle of three Objects (called ‘gluggling’, as if we did not know) is one hour nineteen minutes and fifty-eight seconds while the official record for Chainsaw juggling is eighty-eight catches. Such juggling feats are all incredible! How do they do it?

Interestingly it has been stated that, in contrast to normal sports, “The death knell in juggling is to watch any individual object.” Some jugglers have explained that it is best to keep your eyes at the top of the arch for each path of each ball thrown. It is all about using peripheral vision, about the big picture of all the objects. As one juggler put it, “Our instinct is to look at each ball or task separately, because we want to have control. It’s a very insecure feeling: you influence something, and then you can’t influence it, and then you’re expected to catch it. But if you’re tied to each little specific, you’ll lose sight of the big picture.” A juggler has to be flexible and fearless, not afraid to make a mistake.

Many of us teachers feel that we are like jugglers as we seem to have at any one time numerous objects up in the air. Secondary teachers are juggling many different classes at different levels at the same time. Each individual class has many different abilities, interests and attitudes to juggle all at once. And then there are all the other aspects of teaching – the preparation, the marking, the report-writing to juggle. On top of that, there are different clubs, different sports, different house duties, different school duties … there are so many different things going on as part of the teacher’s job all day every day. And did we happen to mention home life, church life, family life…? How can a teacher possibly cope with keeping so many objects in the air at any one time? We all know that women can multi-task (“Men, if you ever want to know what a woman’s mind feels like, imagine a browser with 2857 tabs open, all the time”) but what about the poor male species?

Part of it might be seen in the explanation that a juggler gave above; we keep sight of the big picture – we look at all our tasks and duties at the top of the arc. We see that they are all part of one action, in developing each individual child.

However, the key can actually be found in a comment made by another juggler, Gary Keller, who said that “Juggling is an illusion. … In reality, the balls are being independently caught and thrown in rapid succession. … It is actually task switching.” Juggling is picking up one task, doing it well and putting it down before picking up the next; the same is true of teaching. So in truth, we do go back to the original point; we must keep our eye on each ball. We are not teaching an English class at the same moment that we are coaching a hockey team; we do one then we do the other. The secret is giving full attention to each task while doing that task and not taking our eye off it, though in our peripheral vision we can see where everything else fits into place. In fact, therefore, we are not juggling (even if at times we feel like we are ‘gluggling’!) but doing a variety of different activities one after the other, with each one coming back into play not long after. So, we must keep our eye on the ball! If we do not see that, we will miss it!