Mushtaq Ali writes about the perfect student as the one who inherits your art and passes you. If this is what you want, he says, prepare yourself, prepare your ego.
I am interested in this preparation, in addressing ego in the context of teaching.
How do you know when your student is becoming advanced? Perhaps their work is more sophisticated, their basics more graceful, their understanding deepened. This can be a hard question to answer.
How do you know when your student is advanced enough that they might pass you in ability? This is easier to answer: ask your ego.
It is ego who understands comparisons, who looks around the room to see who is taller, stronger, smarter. It is ego who can tell the moment your student seems capable of doing something better than you, and ego who can tell you what, exactly “better” means.
Ego is not particularly good at subtle questions, however, such as asking if what you teach can be measured so that comparison is even possible. You teach at many levels at once but ego likes to keep things simple, so ego will tell you that it is simple.
Teachers who have pride in their ability to teach can be surprised at their mixed emotions when their student unexpectedly excels. To a teacher seeking excellence, it may seem necessary to choose between excellence and the ego-desire to stand at the front of the room and be respected and admired and emulated.
This choice is artificial and unnecessary. Expand your view to include all of this without suppressing or denying. If you can accept all your desires, you can see them more clearly. What is hidden controls you, but what you can see, you can use.
Look into the dark corners. In the privacy of your own mind and heart seek the extremes of possibilities: your talented student fails — are you relieved? The student succeeds brilliantly — have you any envy? The student comes to you asking advice. Are you reassured? “I need you,” the student says. What do you feel?
This can be a tangled set of motivations, even for the most self-aware of teachers. On the other side of this tangle, of course, waits our greatest prize: a student who goes farther than we thought our teaching could lead, who validates our deepest work as teachers. It is a tangle worth walking through.
Such tangles can be difficult for the teacher to see through; as a student becomes better, the teacher appropriately becomes more demanding, holding the student to higher standards. It is easy to find reasons to hold the student back, reasons that can at once be based on the student’s best interest and on the teacher’s own ego fears.
As teachers we are capable of opening the way for our students to see more than we do, to go farther, to offer us insights in return, but not if we are sabotaging ourselves through fears that the student will show us wanting, show us as unnecessary. So bring this fear into the open, excavate it, seek behind it.
Such ego desire does not make us unworthy teachers for talented students; how we treat the matter is what is important — this we can teach. If we deny our ego-desire to be superior, we simply strengthen its ability to work in darkness and sabotage our teaching. This is difficult work and needs a light touch. Force this self-revelation harshly and we lose important subtleties and send ego into hiding.
There are those who say that a teacher of depth and spirit should be able to teach without ego. If I ever become such a teacher, I might then be able to offer an opinion. In the meantime, I seek to accept my ego’s desires without allowing it to control my teaching. Just as we might treat a student so passionate about achievement that they get in the way of their own learning, we might usefully employ objectivity, humor and care when dealing with our own ego. This practice on ourselves prepares us to treat our students (and their ego-desires) with the same clarifying humor and gentleness.
Your student reflects you and your teaching. The closer you are to them, the more they will demonstrate your strengths and weaknesses. If you can show them how to look beyond your image to their own, they can show you more about who you are.
