Guru's Handbook

It is essential that you learn to see pain in your students. Even if you believe that pain should never part of your teaching, you should study discomfort and pain in your students to know what it looks like. Close your eyes to this and you lose the ability to make an active [...]

If you intend to teach deeply you will almost certainly be part of the process of causing pain to your student. You cannot teach without offering discomfort to your students. Some of them may truly suffer. The deeper the learning, the more likely this is. Why?
Learning is change. Change often brings [...]

In the context of teaching and learning, I use “pain” to mean an experience anywhere in the range from minor discomfort to agony.
By “damage” I mean something else: some part of the student’s normal process — physical or emotional or psychological or spiritual — no longer works, because it has endured some sort of strain [...]

There are many good reasons to have a school that does not need or accept new students. But if you teach in a school that cannot survive without an influx of new students, you must be part of the force that reaches out to these new students and helps them find their way into [...]

There may come a moment where, with your help, the student opens a new door to something special, and the student’s world is changed.
There are many possible teacher traps in this moment, including wondering how much of what has happened was due to you, how much to the situation, and how much to the student. [...]