"Learning to Teach" - Marco M.
Learning to Teach
As a school, we have recently received an email that contains many constructive ideas regarding teaching. This public response of mine is personal and is intended to be a contribution, albeit minimal, to the possibility of understanding.
The necessary premise is that all Yoga schools call them "teacher training" because they give the fundamentals tools for teaching. In our case, we are not so presumptuous as to decide who is ready or not to teach, and we also honor the many who sign up for a legitimate personal interest with no intention of teaching. Regardless, the only real intransigent judge of the goodness or otherwise of a teacher is the "market". If a teacher is successful, he's good, if he doesn't succeed, he's not. It's as simple as that.
Students mostly expect to learn techniques and store information from a course, not knowing that these techniques (yoga poses, alignments, etc.) are only the scant 10% of the components of a good and successful teacher. The information is probably worth less than 1%. The remaining 90% is learning how to relate to potential students and solve the most varied and disparate problems. Among these problems, for example, are: what to do when some student is late for class; what to do if someone's phone rings; how to behave when someone interrupts by asking questions that are not always constructive; how to manage those who do not have the slightest technical knowledge or body awareness to follow a lesson. Trainees in training courses who begin to encounter these subjects and modalities must be considered lucky and not the other way around. Those who slow down an alignment class because they are not able to understand and execute them, provide the future teachers with the opportunity to learn how to deal with the "problems" which they will then have to deal with in the future. When someone disrupts a class, it is not the fault of that someone, but the responsibility lies with the teacher who allows them to do so. The "disrupting" dynamics that occur during a training course are not disturbances but perhaps the most valuable teachings. The teacher must learn to walk that very fine line from which one often falls between intransigent discipline and condescension, between useless egoic eruptions and becoming a doormat trampled on by the students.
Every situation is different and there are no textbooks to prepare people for all this. Observing even just how the teacher deals with them and the result she/he obtains with that modality is part of the wealth of knowledge to be acquired.
For all these reasons, and others that I am not going to list, when I say that the only important subject is philosophy to the detriment of technique, I do not do it only for the sake of provocation: I really believe in it.
Whatever technique is, with an intense yet relatively short commitment, usually two or three years, you make it your own, for everything else, a life is not enough. If it is not clear that it is not the "other" who has to learn how to behave but I who has to understand how to manage his behavior, the task becomes very difficult.
m.m.