Teaching does have a product, and it is hidden in plain sight. Ultimately the teacher’s product is the teacher themself. [...]
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Teaching does have a product, and it is hidden in plain sight. Ultimately the teacher’s product is the teacher themself. [...] A teacher has great power to demonstrate good endings, to give the student a way to transition from one path to another, one level to another, one teacher to another – or to no teacher. [...] The currency of trust is best served when we do more and promise less. [...] April first is a good day to consider the limitations of seriousness. Teachers, myself included, often take our work seriously in many ways, perhaps one or two ways more than we must. It is hard to stay serious without also falling into rigid thinking about the subject, the students, and oneself, and a rigid [...] Teaching is a conversation. It occurs at many levels, and about many topics. What happens when the student’s part of this conversation turns to adoration and worship of the teacher? That is, what happens to the teacher? Even the most integrated and balanced teacher can be caught off-guard by the attention of a compelling, [...] To teach a student deeply we must study them as well. We develop in our minds composite pictures of who they are, what they can do, what they want, how they excel, what they are afraid of, where they stumble, and so on. Humans do this well: we develop models — maps — about [...]
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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