What Does it Mean to Be a Teacher?
©By Vijaya Sundaram
March 28th, 2013
It means that you:
Give unstintingly of your attention to your student or students who are there to learn from you.
Not allow dislike, prejudice or frustration to mar your interactions, even if a student makes it VERY hard.
Don’t give in to despair when confronted with failure, either on the part of your students to understand, acknowledge, absorb or appreciate the beauty of what you’re offering, or what they’re learning, or on your own part for not always having been all of the things you wanted to be, from time to time — because we’re all exhausted, all human, all prone to retire from time to time, to lick our wounds and self-heal.
Find that which is pure, child-like (with a capacity for wonder, questioning and curiosity) in your student, and teach THAT person within the student.
Listen to, and learn from, your students.
Always remember you’re a conduit (through whom all of the knowledge, learning and understanding flow) not the repository of all of those things.
Love, always love your student, love your own teacher, and love the subject you’re teaching deeply and completely.
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I was thinking of these things after I had a long talk with my husband, teacher extraordinaire.
He had been feeling low, because a student had omitted mentioning him as his music teacher on his website (and had shamelessly mentioned more famous and well-known names in the field). My husband wasn’t expecting gratitude, just acknowledgement, because in this field, as in any great field of artistic and soulful endeavor, one MUST acknowledge one’s teachers, especially those with whom one has spent a significant amount of time.
My husband is primarily a teacher of Indian classical music (among other types of music). He had taught this student thoughtfully, devotedly and completely, over a relatively long period of time, and didn’t expect much back from him. The student was talented, but arrogant, puffed up with a spurious sense of self-importance. We had already seen signs of that while he used to come to our place nine years or so ago, but we dismissed that as the cockiness of youth.
There is no way to get around this, no matter how much one might try and dismiss it as a passing wind which we “respect not.” To find that one is consciously omitted rankles. One would have to be a sage to brush it off.
That student’s rank ingratitude and puffed-up self-importance will cause him grief one day. Every person has to face his or her Karmic duty.
What was my husband’s response to feeling low about all this, plus other worries?
This:
I have taught many people; I have always tried to give appropriately to the individual student rather than use prefabricated lessons or curricula.
No two people want or need the same thing. But everyone needs music.
The world’s parlous condition increases our need for song. I sometimes become discouraged…but singing fortifies me and reminds me that I’m just one link in a chain that reaches farther back in time than any of us can imagine.
I have had so many great teachers in my life; I’m remembering them….while thinking of my students. If I cannot give what I know to my students, my teachers’ love and labor was in vain. My teachers loved me. I love my students. That’s how it works.