The moment you realize
your student’s issue
is a lot like yours
is a good moment
When it comes to deep work, our students are mirrors. In them we see our past stumbles, the traps we avoided, the ones we triggered. The harder work is to also see our current challenges.
If you can see nothing of yourself, past or present, in your student’s issues and challenges, you are not their best teacher. You are too distant, too unlike them to understand how best to guide them.
And understanding alone is not enough. As teachers of depth and spirit our sanity check is compassion.
Every teacher-student relationship is a changing mix of distances, of understandings and empathies, of perspectives and impatiences. There is a useful working distance from a mirror; too close and we become caught in details and stumble over irrelevancies; too far away and we no longer feel the compassion that guides our best deep work.
There are many mirror traps, from adoration to revulsion. The common trap is our desire to be beyond the student’s problems, the ones that we find unpleasant because we are not really beyond them.
My offered practice: Look in the mirror of your student and find those things that make you want to withdraw, or to label quickly and move past. Instead, stay there a moment and see what part of yourself you recognize. This is the first step, to look.
To look in this mirror and keep looking at what is uncomfortable enables our best teaching. It will change, what we see there, so we must be willing to look again and again.
When we can look into the mirror without avoiding the parts we recognize, we can also see the student so much more clearly.
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