⚘Branch thought from The things a teacher does when information technologies exponentially proliferate
There are three qualities that teachers can embody:
- Making the journey easier for students in the places where it was next to impossible for themselves: they have forged a difficult path of knowledge acquisition towards a synthesis of their journey. They have internalised this path and, having forged it themselves with the meticulous and involved awareness that this demands, understand it so intimately that they can extract its essential kernels. They wholeheartedly wish that others can move along the same path more quickly. So they pour their efforts into transmitting the most fundamental realisations, accepting that the majority of struggles and details that peppered their own journey might be irrelevant for their students’ own personal path. Ultimately, they transmit this condensed and evocative synthesis of the essential to their students.
- Cultivating enthusiastic wonder for the immensity of human knowledge at their disposal: they expose students to what is out there in the field of knowledge that they are teaching, and in universal knowledge in general. They are broadening their awareness of the dizzying amount of sources of answers and questions that are at their disposal, of which they had hitherto been unaware. This exciting prospect of endless possibilities for finding life-changing nuggets of knowledge instils a deeply, viscerally felt love for the ever-increasing freedom that learning produces (learning is in a way the expansion of our Selves through both a more intimate understanding of the world -including other humans- and a nimble familiarity with some of the means through which we can connect with it -again, including other humans and other beings-, transform it, nurture it, and elevate it)
- Situating students within a proud quest larger than themselves: they instil an awareness in them that the teacher’s journey and the path they have forged is part of an old search that stretches across time and space. It is a search that they can be a part of, and all those who precede them -carrying the torch and igniting new torches- were simply humans just like them, in all their inadequate yet original quirks, their vulnerability, their sacrifices when going against the current, and their subjection to their own times’ pressures. The teacher instils an awareness of this genealogy, showing the students that they would become part of a group engaged in a great timeless quest, and that honouring those who came before will also solidify an unshakeable source of pride within them.
This all is so students will sense and dare to venture into uncharted areas that emerge from their teachers’ path of knowledge, while protecting the tradition that they are committed to. And armed by their teacher’s inherited love for knowledge, they forge and synthesise their own paths for the next generations.