Robyn Bartlett
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Hard agree, Mike – sense of humour is lowkey everything. It helps me not take myself too seriously most of the time, and when I delight in saying something “stupid” or not knowing something, or learning something new, or whatever, it makes everything more fun AND it allows students the freedom to do the same. Humour enables “I don’t know” mind. I love it. It is everything. Last year I was drawing a map of England and Europe on the whiteboard for students, and I like forgot Scandinavia. Like I just left it out. And a student gingerly said something like, um, professor? It was amazing. And hilarious. (I have been teaching for 25 years; humour about stuff like this has taken time, for me at least!) I was staring at what I’d drawn and was like, wait, that’s not where France is? A student said “you know, we could just use the computer screen thing,” and everyone agreed that the mistake and resulting hilarity was way, way more fun. As teachers, we can then model for students that it is okay not to know, or to flub what we really do know, etc etc.
I love this answer, Melanie – “I don’t know mind,” hell yes, and ditto to acclimation to jargon. I always learn more when I teach, which is, as you say, exhilarating. thank you for putting this so well!!!
Hey y’all – sorry this is late-ish. I’m on the struggle bus these days!
All teaching is discovery, is what I would say, and supporting discovery means a general “allowing” that enables it to happen. Someone – I think Plato – said that learning involves remembering what you forgot. So while it’s true that when I teach my students (I am a university professor of literature), they are learning things about, say, Chaucer, that they did not know before. But they also discover the capacity of their own minds to understand and hold those ideas – to be enlivened by the discovery of what was already there. Teaching is like turning the lights on, slowly (so dimmable lights, i guess!) in a room. At first you bump your shins, etc (or lord knows I do), and then as the light gets brighter, you not only recognize what is there, but it feels like a revelation: OH! Of course that is a desk. I can walk around it, put things on it, etc etc.
I often say to my undergrads that while I always (almost) have answers to the questions I ask them, I don’t care whether they figure those out. I *know* what I think, and I will tell them what I think more than they would ever wish. LOL. But I want to know what *they* think. Because a lot of the time what they think is interesting and monumentally important for *their* discovery of what the class is meant to impart. If what we are studying is worthwhile, when they learn it, they discover what is already there. (BTW I think this is true for science, too, though I could never teach that at just about any level. Not that I know about relativity, but if I could understand it, I would *recognize* it as true.)
It makes even more sense, then, that for me a tool for teaching meditation is allowing for that discovery. In the first class, Susan said that teaching meditation is tantamount to asking a student to “let me in there,” into their mind or heart. Obviously teaching literature is not that – and even that kind of non-sacred teaching requires allowing for discovery. In the case of meditation, though, the discovery is turned inward and outward simultaneously, and we as teachers can’t know what the result will be. When I teach literature, I know at least the shape of the discovery; I know the land to which we are traveling. Here, one helps the meditation student navigate to an unknown (but magical) place, and so it requires a deeper allowing for that discovery. That’s cool. It’s in keeping with what I understand about teaching but more profound. It’s the teaching that animates all other teaching, or something like that.