Why is so hard to learn, and why does it gets it harder the older we get?
Of lately I have been ruminating on teaching, on that delicate and always changing relations between those who teach, and those who learn. Once upon a time, talking about this with one of my most beloved teachers, the great Maruja Tarre, I vaguely said that it was the responsibility of the teacher to keep the attention of the class. A good teacher would never had people falling sleep in their class, would they? I asked. To which Maruja take a look at me, half laughing in her eyes and proceeded to ask what was so boring from her classes then, given the many times I closed my eyes and opened them few minutes later with a shock and a look of being somewhere else. The awkward moment you discover that you are not the student you think you are, then. Or the time that my friend Barbe remembered that we meet when she was introduced as our diving teacher, to which I answered that I had already 300some dives.
Given that we passed those rocky beginnings, I am convinced that both Barbe and Maruja are gentle souls, capable to see through the insecurities (and structural lack of sleep) of young, and not so young, students. But thinking in my old high school chemistry teacher, I wonder if his own harshness wasn’t a reaction to us, his students. It is clear to me that many teachers believe that they have to “break” the innate resistance to learn from his students, and violence is one way to go about it. When I started diving in The Netherlands, I did it on my own concur. It was around 2010, and I knew that whatever I learned and practiced in the eighties and the nineties needed refreshing. And yet, I also needed to tell the teacher that I didn’t really need teaching.
If we are the ones asking for learning, why do we need so hard to defend ourselves from learning?
There is an old japanese drawing that describes how the teachings of my fencing school were given to humans. A tengu, a bird shaped goblin, came to the founder of the style meanwhile he was meditating in the mountains, and taught him our sword techniques. In the drawing there is indeed a fierce crow-like bird, more or less above a formally dressed samurai, holding a katana in an offensive stance. The samurai also has a drawn katana, but it is checked behind his body, not even in a defensive stance. When our japanese teacher interpreted this drawing to us, his western students, he explained that a student should acknowledge the importance of the act of teaching. That explained the formal kimono that the samurai wear. But also, a student should drop his defenses, should be fully open. There is no learning when being defensive. And so the meaning of the drawn but checked katana.
Interestingly enough, my japanese teacher of fencing is one of the gentler teachers I have ever met.