Week 3: Day 14 – Personal
“Once the pupil sees it for himself, he can make the change without any trouble.” Marjorie Barstow
Some teachers are difficult not because they are unskilled, but because their skill is tangled up with something else – ego, charisma, power, or a need to dominate the room. One of my visiting teachers during training was like that. I won’t name him, but he had what we call “wonderful hands”: clear, confident, masterful. In his hands I felt like a puppet – lifted, placed, arranged, moved in ways I could never reproduce on my own. He could put my feet far out in front of me on the chair, lean me forward, and whisk me up to standing with astonishing ease. It was impressive. It was also disempowering. The movement was so big, so dramatic, so his, that I couldn’t use it. It didn’t belong to me.
When I was around him, I felt prickly and bristled. I found him arrogant, argumentative, always needing to have a counter‑opinion, as if the room were a stage and he was the necessary antagonist. He seemed to enjoy the shock he created, the tussle, the outrage. Perhaps he thought he was testing us – seeing who would ‘react,’ who would rise to the bait. I often found myself doing what I could to appease, to stay small, to stay safe.
Then one day he asked me out. I felt like Miss Eliza Bennet hearing Darcy’s first proposal – astonished, confused, unable to reconcile the man’s behaviour with the feelings he claimed to have for me. His interest had been so well hidden that I genuinely had no idea. I, of course, declined, and after that I avoided him as much as possible.
But the experience didn’t end there. At a shared lunch table some weeks later, I caught myself mimicking him – legs apart, arm draped over the chair beside me, giving forth about something with a confidence that wasn’t mine. In the moment I felt powerful, matching his big energy with my own. But afterwards I felt embarrassed. It wasn’t in my integrity to behave this way; it was imitation. A borrowed posture. A defensive performance. And underneath it, perhaps, some old family shame and guilt about challenging the powerful man.
What this taught me
Working with him revealed something I hadn’t seen so clearly in myself:
- my tendency to appease when someone is domineering
- my discomfort with conflict
- my susceptibility to being pulled into someone else’s energy
- my habit of shrinking or inflating in response to power
He showed me how easily I could lose myself – either by collapsing or by copying. And he showed me how seductive a teacher’s authority can be, especially when paired with technical brilliance.
It was uncomfortable, but it was clarifying.
How it compares to having a difficult student
With a difficult student, I often feel the urge to reach them, to find the right angle, the right question, the right moment of contact. With him, the difficulty was reversed: I had to find a way to stay with myself. The challenge wasn’t to get through to him – it was to not let him get into me, to be taken over, to lose myself.
A difficult student may test my skills and patience. This difficult teacher tested my boundaries.
Both reveal habits I didn’t know I had. Or that shone a light on them in a new way.
How it shapes my teaching now
I teach very differently because of him.
- I never want a student to feel like a puppet in my hands
- I never want to dazzle someone with something they can’t recreate
- I never want my presence to override their agency
- I never want my authority to silence their own noticing
His mastery showed me what not to do. His arrogance showed me what not to become. His impact showed me how important it is to create safety, not spectacle.
And perhaps most importantly, he taught me this: A student can only “see it for themselves” when the teacher steps back enough for them to look and see themselves.