Klarinet Archive - Posting 000123.txt from 2000/02

From: "Kevin Fay (LCA)" <kevinfay@-----.com>
Subj: [kl] Adult Amateur Students
Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 23:23:16 -0500

Jim Youngman made an insightful comment:

<<<<A good teacher is much more open. It is defunct educational theory that
a child is an empty jug waiting to be filled. . . .

The first teacher I contacted welcomed me as an adult amateur student. Yes,
I do challenge him from time to time. >>>>

This is the crux of the issue, I think. Many teachers don't like to be
"challenged" -- it's emotionally so much easier to control a child, where
the teacher can assume that all of the wisdom impartation will be one-way.

(Note--the 11-year-olds may have a different view.)

There was a book out moons ago ("I'm OK, You're OK" was the title, I think)
which was a short pop psyche nugget over interpersonal communication. In a
nutshell, there are 3 nodes of communication: Parent, Adult, Child,
expressed in a matrix:

P P

A A

C C

You express the levels of interaction by drawing lines between the modes of
the communicating parties: a parent chatting with a child would have two
parallel lines from the P in one column to the C in the other. The point of
the book was that if the "lines get crossed," real communication suffers.
For example: a parent of a teenager will scold him or her in a P <----> C
exchange; the teenager wants to interact on a A <-----> A basis will
"cross," and communication will break down. Many young students are
content to communicate from the C node -- many adult students won't.
Consequently, those teachers who insist on treating all students as children
are going to have a problem.

Is this universal? No and yes. No in that there certainly are *some*
teachers who are willing to communicate on a A <-----> A basis. Yes in that
there will be communication problems whenever expectations for the personal
interaction are different.

I had a teacher in college that I thought was fantastic -- learned bunches
from him. He didn't like me much, however -- I asked too many questions,
which he (mistakenly) took not to be intellectual curiosity but an affront
to his authority. His teaching style and my learning style didn't match
up, so the relationship was not as effective as it could have been.

Ramblingly yours,

kjf

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