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| Paddy McGrath (not my yoga teacher - yet) |
I had a thought-provoking email
exchange with my yoga teacher recently. It started when I complained that he hadn’t helped
me with a particular problem – it emerged that he hadn’t even really taken in
that I had (perhaps too subtly) been trying to draw his attention to this
matter for some time. His perspective was that students were always coming to
him with problems at inopportune moments, when there was no time to deal with
them properly – in his eyes, my case was yet another example of this. I pointed
out that if students come to him at awkward moments, this is because he doesn’t
allow any time during the class to address individual issues – the way he has
set things up, there is no opportune moment to ask him for individual
attention. He acknowledged that this is true, and said he’d think about how to
change it (resisting any temptation to throw me out of the class at this
point).
In the course of this exchange, I started
to reflect on my own teaching practice at university, and realised that what I
do is almost exactly the same. I teach in what is generally a pretty
traditional format of lectures and group tutorials. While the more confident
students do ask plenty of questions and contribute their perspectives within
this framework, one-on-one exchanges are generally squeezed into a few minutes
before the next tutorial, so that discussion of individual issues, or exchanges
with less gregarious students, are very limited. I do have a consultation
hour each week when students can come to see me in my (shared) office, but few
take up this opportunity. The occasional student will come to discuss an essay,
but more commonly students only come at this time to ask for and justify
extensions.
In some ways, this feels like a ‘safe’
arrangement – I can present material that I’ve already worked through, without too
much danger that I’ll be asked to venture into areas that are unfamiliar or too
personal. Similarly, if a student doesn’t feel confident to speak, they don’t
have to. On the other hand, it’s also very limiting, and throws everyone back
on their own resources, instead of allowing insights – or problems - to emerge
within relationships built on trust. In this style of teaching, contacts with
students usually remain fairly superficial – or extremely superficial in the
case of the many students who don’t even turn up, now that lectures are
available on line, and tutorial attendance is (more or less) optional. Teaching
(and learning) in this way can feel rather lonely. As the teacher, it often
seems that you’re just there to provide a product, which the students pay for
and take away. Even if they write nice things in their teaching assessments,
indicating that they’re well satisfied with the product you’ve supplied, the
exchange often doesn’t go much deeper than that.
Toward the end of the email conversation with
my yoga teacher, he wrote something that made a strong impression on me. He
said, “It's humbling when you realise (as the so-called teacher) how much
experience and wisdom the people attending classes have, and you realise it's
as much about coming together and doing the practice together as it is about
who is up the front.”
I think he’s pointing to something very
important here about the process of teaching and learning, and it goes beyond
the truism that the teacher has as much to learn from the students, as the
students have to learn from the teacher. His words suggest that the role of
teacher is one that circulates in a group of people who are learning together.
There’s one person who is called the teacher – and with this title come certain
responsibilities: if you have accepted the role of teacher, it’s important to carry
these out well. But central to doing so is the willingness to recognise that
there is a well of experience and wisdom in the group that is deeper than
anything an individual can draw on alone. To do this requires resisting both ingrained
habits and sometimes very strong pressures from “so-called” students for the
teacher to behave as if he or she is the sole fount of knowledge and wisdom
available. The flip-side of this pressure is the scathing criticism that the
same students will tend to direct toward the teacher as soon as he or she
disappoints their unrealistic expectations.
On the teacher’s side, it seems to me that
with the role of teacher comes the temptation and danger of narcissism. If you
forget that you are just playing a certain role, and start to identify too
closely with the title of teacher, you can start to believe that you really are
the single, superior fount of wisdom in a group – or at least to feel that you
ought to be, and then to worry that you’re not up to this standard (a kind of
reverse narcissism). These delusions only distract a person from cultivating
the real skills of a true teacher – from becoming a true teacher of no rank, to
put it in the language of zen.
Of course, the danger of narcissism is not
restricted to the teaching profession – it seems fair to suppose that it might be even more widespread
among blog-writers... So at this point I will restrain myself and get back to the
one activity in which my teaching practice provides for one-on-one interaction
(albeit of a peculiarly painful kind): marking essays.
