06-21-2012, 10:51 AM
Last week I went to Louisville to score English exams for the advanced placement program (high school students can take an exam to earn college credit for a high school class). Each student has to write three essays. Teachers are flown in from all over the world to score the essays. About 4000 of us descend on Louisville each year. We sit in the convention center from 8-5 for seven days and read the essays. While I was sitting there, I had the following insight (well, it works for me, but I'm not sure it would for others, but I offer it anyway--just leave it if it doesn't speak to you 
).
I read about 1200 essays last week. Each individual essay "taught" me (through the errors the students made) something about performing the task well and badly--but no ONE essay could serve as the model for my students. Instead, as the teacher, I had to synthesize all the "experience" I had from reading the essays and distill that into principles I could then pass it on to my students. They will use the principles, and then, through trial and error, with me assisting (but not taking over and writing the papers for them), they will eventually build up enough understanding to write very well--and then, they will distill their own experience, building upon mine, but now at a higher arc because they were able to start with mine, and then they will one day have students of their own(those who choose to follow the path of teacher).
In like fashion, those that come before us live many lives and the distillation of understanding at the end of an epoch becomes the archetypes that we are given to start with, then we build upon those, adding our own experiences and understandings. From the other side, our teachers seek to impress concepts that can help us upon our psyche, being very careful not to compromise our agency. From this evolution we are now living, we will eventually "graduate" and then, as a unity, generate 'principles--or archetypal understandings--that will inform the next epoch.
).I read about 1200 essays last week. Each individual essay "taught" me (through the errors the students made) something about performing the task well and badly--but no ONE essay could serve as the model for my students. Instead, as the teacher, I had to synthesize all the "experience" I had from reading the essays and distill that into principles I could then pass it on to my students. They will use the principles, and then, through trial and error, with me assisting (but not taking over and writing the papers for them), they will eventually build up enough understanding to write very well--and then, they will distill their own experience, building upon mine, but now at a higher arc because they were able to start with mine, and then they will one day have students of their own(those who choose to follow the path of teacher).
In like fashion, those that come before us live many lives and the distillation of understanding at the end of an epoch becomes the archetypes that we are given to start with, then we build upon those, adding our own experiences and understandings. From the other side, our teachers seek to impress concepts that can help us upon our psyche, being very careful not to compromise our agency. From this evolution we are now living, we will eventually "graduate" and then, as a unity, generate 'principles--or archetypal understandings--that will inform the next epoch.
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