You have a man on the inside joke

I like to think about language. i like to think about languages also. And dialects. And sub-dialects. They interest me because they unite us and divide us constantly. One of the terms I learned in grad school (or maybe after grad school, in grad school) was "code shifting," the need to switch sub dialects seamlessly as we move from one cultural context to another. After speaking with my kids, I turn to my wife and speak with her. After writing this blog post (is it ironic that this interface underlines "blog" as a misspelled word?), I have to write a formal letter to someone. Each social interaction requires a subtly different language/dialect, so I have to be able to assess the need and adopt the write vocabulary and tone.

One of life's challenges is being able to code shift as quickly as the world demands. I work in a school with over 600 students and about 100 faculty and staff. With each one, I have crafted a dialect based in the words, expressions and experiences I share with each one. That isn't particularly unique -- people in any workplace have to flip in and out of conversations and code shift. But some of the extremes here can be difficult.

When one student comes up to me and expects me, while I am in mid-sentence with another teacher, to remember the 3 minute conversation I had with him or her the day before, and be able to flip over to that, answer the issue and switch back, that is tough. When 15 students surround me while I am on the phone with a parent, and each wants me to solve a particular issue, it isn't about the issue, it is about lacking the foundational context to process each, but being able to jump to that scenario in the middle where I left off, speak to the student as if we are the closest of friends who know exactly what we mean, and then move to the next. This the inside joke theory. You see, everything is an inside joke, and most of the time, only two people are inside. I think that the definition of crazy is that you can't understand that no one else is inside (or that you imagine that others who don't exist are inside).

One thing which makes my job tough is that other people seem to think that their universe/context is the only one anyone else knows or should know so they jump into it with no explanation or pause. Even if I share that context, I can't always know what they are working on. When I don't share that context, the task becomes even harder.

The moral? I'm rarely if ever in your brain, so don't yell at me that I didn't wipe my shoes off.