For Teachers
a.k.a
anyone on a horse, anyone sharing information
What if we start with: "Everyone is doing their
best to do their best. No-one is intentionally,
consistently doing the harmful or non-beneficial thing
thinking it's the beneficial thing to do."
Would that be a fairly true statement?
Like, no-one's trying to be a bone-head. That's not
the goal. The student/horse is not intentionally
making the life of the teacher miserable. They're not
intentionally dense or confrontational.
For the most part, when a student/horse is told what the goal is --
like, "here's the bulls eye, hit the center of
it," it can be fairly well assumed they are
doing their best to hit the center of the bulls eye. Whether or not to hit the center of the bulls eye is not up
for debate. And repeatedly telling them to hit the
bulls eye in the center does not automagically give them
the skill set to hit the bulls eye in the
center.
So then the question becomes, "Why is a person
doing something that really just isn't helping themselves
or the horse?"
Which, as a teacher, this is a fundamental
question. Because as teachers, we are guides.
We have answers. We wish to share these answers with
other people so they have answers and their lives are 'all
better.' So as teachers, we need to teach from a
place that is actually beneficial. That is our
goal. That's what we want to be doing. We don't
want to be bone-heads either. (Safe to say,
right?) We want to illuminate and inspire, give
confidence, facilitate success, do all kinds of nifty
things. It's not about us showing our prowess.
It's about us, the teacher, setting up the student. whether
a person, a rider, or a horse, so the
student can learn.
One of the great things Sally Swift did with Centered
Riding was to expand the concept of how people learn.
Not everyone does well being told to do exactly the right
thing at exactly the right time. Her contribution of
tapping into the
gestalt areas of the brain allows folks to learn at a
deeper, more organic level, allowing them to own what they
learn. To really learn, actually.
Some folks are very used to being micro-managed and
actually like that and do pretty well with it. It's
different, though, from learning a skill and owning
it. The folks who are micro-managed can look good
while they're being micro-managed -- just like horses that
are micro-managed can look really good in those sales
videos, only to fall apart when you get them home.
The reason being, when the micro-manager is not there, the
student/horse does not have a reliable sense of what is beneficial
and what isn't.
And I will throw out my own opinion that there is a
certain violence to micro-managing, an implicit message
that the student is incapable without the constant
direction of the teacher. To me, it seems that the
student is also robbed of experiencing the joy of learning
something in their own way. So not only do they not
learn, they get a message that how they learn is incorrect
and that they are incapable of learning. So I will go
on the record here as saying that micro-managing is not my
preferred form of teaching.
And yet, you will on occasion find me doing it because
sometimes it is the thing that is desired and/or allows for
some semblance of hitting the bulls eye. And in
some circles it is the preferred way of teaching -- so,
when in Rome, etc. :/
When that particular restriction isn't 'dictated,' it
fruitful to ask oneself , "Why
is a person doing something that really just isn't helping
themselves or the horse?"
More thoughts on this to come ...
L
|