“Patience” says the teacher.
“But when?” asks the student.
“When it is time.”

It is easy to conclude that patience is about doing nothing, about waiting, about delay.

That is not patience.

There is no point to waiting for goals to ripen when our lives can end in seconds. There is no point to hoping for a better day that may never come. This is not patience, this is waiting.

What is patience, then?

Patience is noticing. It is the asking of a question without too fast an answer. Perhaps the question is: is now the time to try again? Shall I use more force, more gentleness, something else? Will any effort move this forward, or must the world first change around me?

How can we know? We cannot know. Knowing is beyond us. But looking and seeing is not beyond us. Patience is a way of looking and seeing.

It is human to strive to gain what we desire. We imagine how the world could be with this thing in hand. In our imagining and planning we can forget to see how things are now. Thus blinded, the goal is even harder to grasp.

We may act or pause out of fear, fear of wasting time, fear of making mistakes. When fear drives us, this is also not patience.

Patience is not a lack of action, but a way of action. Patience is looking at what we want without desire and fear blotting out detail. Patience is pausing to look, taking measure of what is before us.

My offered practice: consider a delayed or thwarted desire. Hold the matter keenly in mind and heart. Allow drive and planning to come to the fore. Then pause. Breathe into desire to loosen and lighten it a little. Put aside planning for a moment. Notice the desire, touch it gently, but also look beyond and through it. Slow the moment. Watch the world through this slowed moment.

Patience is engaged observation.

Look again at the matter. Through desire and fear at the thing itself. Take measure of the situation. Is it time to try again? Let the flow of the world continue first? A third direction? A fourth?

Take another moment. Notice how things are. Look at the world beyond desire, past planning, past imagination.

This is patience.

I was recently asked for advice on how to improve performance in an area with which I have some familiarity. As I considered the range of ways I might answer, the many things I could say that could be true and might be useful, I was reminded of how easy it is to say too much.

I have seen teachers asked advice eagerly launch into a detailed, wide-ranging answer that could satisfy months of study. What does this accomplish? Often a flood of answers overwhelms the asker’s interest, forcing them to either swim sudden depths or to back away.

It is simiplistic to say to the teacher, “say less”, but it is better to say less than discourage a truly interested student from pursuing. If we are knowledgable pratitioners, we can make any subject complicated. Why would we do this? We may be proving our understanding, or expressing our love for the study, or even testing the asker’s sincerity. While there are times for all these things, consider the teacher’s mandate: to help the student swim.

Show them the water and let them decide how deep to get. Open the way for them to ask more questions when they have them.

Advice is best given in small doses. The excellent teacher picks the one concept or practice that is likely to produce the best work — at this time, for this student, for this study — and leaves the rest unsaid.

Which, admittedly, is harder than it sounds.

And so my offered practice: say less.

Man plans. God laughs.

This is a very old saying. It means, in essence, that no plan survives contact with the world.

As teachers, we know this — at least intellectually. But do we embrace it? Do we take the odd twists and turns as we teach with any measure of appreciation? Or do we merely tolerate the inevitable variation from our plan? Is a grudging acceptance the best we can do?

Perhaps we wrestle with each deviation, determined that any laughter should be about someone else. Given enough time, many of us finally arrive at a mature acceptance of the on-going derailment of our intent.

What a shame.

Of this world, we can only see what we are willing to see. If we are resolutely determined to be flexible in our lesson plan we will only see what is closest to our plan, what is near by, what we might be able to pull closer. We will not notice the possibilities that lie farther away, that are tucked in corners, that are startling, that are absurd.

It can be hard to summon curiosity about deviations from our plan when we are working toward a goal that others are depending on us to reach. But if we hold too tightly to a plan, we can miss its goal entirely.

It is good to have a plan. It is good to hear laughter, too. In our teaching work, can we learn to delight in the unexpected? To see it? To use it?

My offered practice: notice an alteration or interruption in your teaching, something that takes you away from your plan, and see if you can regard it with something approaching appreciation. What can you teach with the moment in which you find yourself? If you can discover a way to laugh as well, all the better.

“Good work, people!”

What does this mean? Good performance? Good effort? Good that the teacher’s class is fully subscribed?

Especially in a large class where inevitably some students are doing better work than others, the student will wonder what, if anything, this statement has to do with them.

Students always have a choice to participate or attend a class at all, and of course we want to encourage them. This can mean a tension between encouraging them to continue and offering feedback that might not. Especially for beginners, we may be hard pressed to know what to say that is both inspiring and true, and so end up with a generic “good work!”

Such praise can be worse than useless. It is impersonal enough to weaken our credibility with the student. What happens when we observe truly good work? What will we say then?

In a large class, we may not have time to praise each student for their individual talent or drive. Even so, we can strengthen our praise by making it more specific.

We can praise attention: “I’m pleased to see some of you with very solid focus here today.”

We can praise persistence and attitude: “I know this subject can be hard and some of you are clearly frustrated but are keeping at it anyway, and so special kudos to you.”

We can praise the courage to be there at all: “For those of you who have never done this before, thank you for giving me — and this subject — your time and attention and willingness.”

Remember, when a student chooses our teaching, they are taking a risk on us as teachers: they are offering to let us change them. This is a great trust. For some of them, this is the hard, good work.

We must make our praise a faithful reflection for the student and not generic encouragement. We must be good and useful mirrors. This is how we give the student something they can take with them and something to come back for.

In Teaching with a Clear Signal I explored teaching by presenting one clear thing at a time to create trust and authenticity. How do we find this clear thing in ourselves?

There are times when pretense is called for in teaching. Teaching is often a dramatic work. But when you mean to present a clear signal, perhaps most useful is aspect of dramatics that is focused on enhancing what is existant rather than the aspect of pretending what is not. This is not so different from what we do day to day, presenting one side of ourselves at work, and another at home. In teaching, our intent to be excellent asks us to present these different facets of ourselves as consciously and deliberately as possible. To be self-aware in our presentation.

When it comes to creating yourself in a genuine way before your students, it is useful to know how to first create clarity in yourself so that you can convey it if you choose, however you choose. A student can more accurately sense your disconnection from your own integrity, from your own clarity, than they can your disconnection from any facts.

That is, you can be speaking a factual truth but be disconnected from your internal clarity, causing the student to percieve a factual lie. This can be frustrating for the teacher who is not aware of this subtle dynamic, or of how their presentation plays into this. We can easily believe we are being genuine, and at least to some students, present the opposite. There are many components to this particular issue, including culture and language, and many other things not particularly to do with internal clarity.

Internal clarity is where we originate our presentation. How do we develop this in ourselves? First we might learn to find unclear signals in ourselves and find ways to untangle them. This requires us to be willing to look at ourselves without harshness or pride or fear. Part of our work as teachers of depth is to learn to look inside and see what is there.

And so we look. What then?

One approach is this: we can create a clearer signal out of any thought we have by taking the thought apart, by stripping it down to component parts, by putting aside anything that is extra.

For example, “This class is too hard for me” is a conceptual and emotional construct. Of what is it made? Be as specific as possible and see if you can find the essential, indivisible elements that construct this concept. Take each piece apart, clean off the extra, and see what remains.

My offered practice is obvious: take a thought or feeling and take it apart until the signal is as clean as you can make it.

At one time I had two cats who would hiss and spit and tear about when the other came near. It was quite an impressive show of conflict.

When I moved into a small house the situation became even more unpleasant. I was awoken in the night by furious, exploding encounters.

I began to feed them together inside a small cat carrier. To get to their food they were forced to be near each other, to interact. Somehow, over time, they began to sort our their differences. My household became more peaceful.

Students in conflict can be pushed to talk to each other, and talking out differences is a fine approach that sometimes works. But words are symbols of something else, and if that something else is not present between students, all the words in the world will make no change. Sharing space, sharing resources, working together — these are the things that help create the substance behind those symbols.

Instead of food, one might use any number of basic resources that students need, enjoy, or assume — whatever the teacher has to work with. I suggest something attractive and appealing rather than an onerous assignment that might feel punitive. Something intriguing and amusing. A fun or odd project. A special opportunity.

Think of food in small spaces.

Does it matter if you like your student?

Among the many roads that lead here are google queries. One recent was “how to make teachers notice you.” I followed this to a number of articles on how to make your teacher like you. There were recommendations about showing up on time, dressing neatly, participating in the class, sitting in the front row, doing the assignments, and that sort of thing.

All reasonable suggestions, for some teachers and some students. Perhaps not for you. It is worth asking yourself what makes you like a student. It may not be these things.

Does it matter if you like your student? If you are teaching deeply, it does. If you dislike them, but you are affecting them profoundly, what does this say about your motivations, about how you will act in their best interests?

While I might not care if I my doctor likes me personally, I do care if they like the study of medicine, if they are intrigued by how my body works, or fails to work. I want my car mechanic to love their work on cars, and my car in particular.

When you teach deeply, you affect the heart and spirit. This is where you work. If you dislike that particular heart and spirit, but are getting deep under the skin, into the inner workings, touching heart and soul, you should be very concerned about what you are doing there.

If you cannot find something to like about your student, you should refrain from teaching them in depth. Instead let them find someone who can feel for them some measure of affection and compassion.

I am not suggesting you let your care and affection drive your teaching. Teaching out of affection for your student can trap you and damage the teaching. At the same time, if you cannot feel tenderness or compassion for your student, there are deep places you cannot and should not take them.

There is an approach to dog training that the dog is always right. This means that if the dog is not doing what you want it to, the training is not working. The dog is working just fine. The human, not the dog, must change.

You see where this is going.

If the student is not learning, what can you as a teacher do to change this? Not what can the student do, but what can you do?

This is not the truth, but an approach. There are dogs that cannot be trained, but they are far, far fewer than frustrated dog-owners would like to believe. Dog obedience classes are mostly about training the human, because as simple as it often seems, training — like teaching — is gruelling, often counter-intuitive work. The human must learn the language of the dog, read subtle cues, and start with the animal where it is, not where they want it to be. No amount of explaining to the dog how it is not listening or motivated or how its future is at stake will make any difference.

Now, students are not dogs, and there are students who do indeed make the choice not to learn, who we might spend a lifetime on, with the finest teachers, and who still might choose not to learn. But this is rare, probably as rare as an untrainable dog, and typically the result of abuse and health issues, as is often the issue with dogs.

Take a puppy — endearing, charming, eager to please — and give the owner a few months of unsolvable behavior problems, and even best-intentioned human will look for someone to blame, most likely the animal.

In our calmer moments we know that blame is counter-productive, both with dogs and students, but when the student seems impossible to manage — let alone to teach — when we are being told we must do something but we have tried everything we know, it is easy to slip into guilt and blame.

Once guilt and blame enter into an understanding between human and animal, the human is looking in the wrong direction and little effective action is possible. When it comes to teacher and student, resentment and blame become a reinforcing cycle. Both are looking in the wrong direction.

The best dog trainers know how to remove blame, guilt, and frustration from the situation long enough to teach the human to train the dog.

After all, the human is also an animal, and the human is also right.

This can be a useful perspective in problem teaching situations. If you can see how the student is right — how the teacher is also right — if you can see this even when that teacher is you and you are sure you should be able to do better — the issue becomes what to do next, rather than explaining or justifying what has occurred. What best serves the student’s learning.

If the student is right, both in behavior and perspective, if blame is removed, what is your next step?

The essential result of clear communication with an audience or student is that they trust you. A teacher is a conversational leader, and if your student trusts you, they will follow you.

It is easier to lead somewhere pleasant, of course, and that is the interesting question: how well does your student follow when you say something they would rather not hear? The two are linked: a student trusts positive feedback only so far as they trust how we offer the negative. This division is, of course, simplistic, and what is really wanted is a clear, unbiased, credible signal upon which they can rely.

How do we accomplish this?

In each moment, what we say must make sense, not only intellectually, but to the part of the student that is mistrustful of authority’s willingness to whitewash anything unpleasant. This does not mean we should aim to say harsh things to prove our credibility, but it does mean that we should take notice when we are about to avoid or soften something, and see what we are doing.

Humans are good at perceiving many levels of communication. Since few of us can control our body and tone well enough to hide effective, students see our attempts to conceal better than we realize. They may not understand what we are hiding, but they sense the lack of clear signal, of our unwillingness to disclose.

So, when faced with something awkward, it is often better to say less, with more clarity, and without bias, because students can tell. That is, say one thing with a clear signal. Then say another.

Clarity is not about completeness, and in any case completeness in communication is impossible. With each word we make choices about what to say next, how complicated, which viewpoint to offer. At any moment, our thoughts can go in various directions, but we must pick one thing to say, and the opportunity to take a different path from this conversational nexus never repeats. We necessarily leave much unsaid.

Which is fine. Constructing genuine communication is about presenting a clear signal in the one thing we are saying now. Pick one thing, say it well, and let there be space around it to allow for the vast area of the unsaid.

My offered practice: find yourself speaking to students about something you are hesitant to reveal. If necessary, arrange this. Speak a bit about the matter, however cautiously. Now approach the topic, again, in another way completely. For example, you might say “I treat this matter delicately because this person needs privacy.” Or you could pick one aspect, one fact, and discuss that alone. To take this a step farther, ask your students which of the two ways you presented this they preferred, and why.

This practice offers you insight into your own clear-signal presentation of difficult material, but also allows you to discuss clear signal communication with your students, using a real world example, and without ever needing to define the “clear signal”.

We have so little time in life to do things. A foul mood, however reasonable or justified or intractable, can make us feel that we are wasting precious time.

What can we do about this? Classic advice includes getting over the mood. Solve it, resolve it. In spiritual circles, rise above it.

Surely, as teachers of spirit and depth, we can at least manage to be calm and even-tempered. This is a reasonable goal, yes? And so our internal fight begins, nicely solidifying our dark mood.

Meditation, taking a break — these things can help us shift our mood, and I recommend them. Change the mood when you can. Which, if you are like me, is not always. So what can we otherwise do to make this time valuable to us and our students?

A bad mood, with perspective, is a great opportunity for a teacher. If your topic allows a discussion of conflict — history, perhaps, or theory — this may be a good time to turn your frustration into that exploration. Some subjects lend themselves less naturally to this, but there is always some conflict to be found.

Whatever you teach, whatever life preparation you intend to provide your students, they will sooner or later themselves have bad moods. What do you want them to do with these moods? Can you teach that, implicitly or explicitly?

What do I mean by implicitly? As you write formulas or draw pictures on the board, your anger or frustration can come through in your fingers and stance and tone. You can suppress this and imagine your students do not see it, or you can bring it out some and show them how this is not a bad thing, it is simply a thing. Your attitude about your own anger comes through physically; can you demonstrate humor along with annoyance?

Or the explicit approach: tell your students about your mood. What parts can you reveal to them that can help them see that you, the teacher, the authority, have dark moods but they do not incapacitate you and you are not controlled by them?

If you attempt to hide your mood and fail, you will look weaker in front of your students. They will see that something is eating at you, distracting you, and that it is not what you are teaching. Perhaps it is them, they will think. Perhaps the administration. Perhaps you fought with your mate. They will wonder, they will guess, they will be distracted.

You can teach to this. It can be as simple as taking possession of your mood and showing them how. You could say “Yes, I am in a bad mood. No, it is nothing to do with you. Yes, I will get over it. Understand? Good, let’s go on with the lesson.”

Saying what is obvious but expected to be unsaid, as anger often is, is a way to gain trust with your students. They will hear the message that you are in control of your own dark side, that you are strong enough to say things that usually not said, and that even when you are in a foul mood the lesson goes on under your direction.

This is a powerful lesson, and a fine way to build emotional credibility.