You will give all that you can
but it is the student
who truly decides
When my student took her own life, I shared the shock of her friends and family. I grieved. I had all the reactions that are common to survivors of suicide, including sorrow and guilt and anger.
I thought back on all our [...]
You may be all that stands between
a student and the darkness
Be humble in your power
Be ruthless in your support
There may be times when you are the one thing keeping a student from the darkness. Whether the darkness is despair or the door to death, you may be the rope that connects them to hope [...]
But you use words so well
Surely they say
exactly what you mean them to
There is a lot to say about remote teaching. The essence is this: when you are physically present with your student, you have the subtle cues that body language and breath and eye movement and tone of voice allow, that no facsimile [...]
Nothing destroys communication
as effectively
as simple words
misunderstood
Even among native speakers, few come to spoken fluency by reading the same books or listening to the same speakers. It is inevitable that we understand even our shared language in subtly different ways.
And yet words create meaning and meaning creates reaction.
When another’s words start to affect you, [...]
It is quite easy to forget what it was like to first learn something that you have practiced for years. One way to hone your teaching skills is to remind yourself of this, to seek to learn at the level at which your students are learning from you. Of course, you have to [...]
All moments bring lessons
Sometimes your presence is enough
Every moment’s happenings, however ordinary or extreme, can be turned into what are called “teachable moments”. As you teach more deeply, you will see how to apply almost anything to the lesson at hand. You will see in each moment, each passing cloud, every one of [...]
Not all students choose you freely
nor do you choose them
A captive resists
teach them to choose
Every culture makes a distinction between children and adults. Though this line is sometimes hard to draw, every culture establishes a way to do so. The distinction serves an essential purpose: to distinguish between those who can make adult [...]
Whatever you teach
your student will pass on
something else
You are not handing your students knowledge, but rather making a path of understanding for them to walk. It is inevitable that they will fail to step where you tell them to and step in places you never stepped.
Whatever it is you are teaching, no matter how [...]
My thanks to Rory at http://chirontraining.blogspot.com/, who writes:
Could you address the situation of long-term friends or significant others who wish to study with you?
This is not the same situation that I discussed in A Student’s Affection, where you have in place a teacher-student relationship to maintain, as your primary obligation. With a friend [...]
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