The learning process

What you as a pupil think is a great success your teacher often has no enthusiasm at all for. And what you think is a terrible failure may sometimes please your teacher.

Now from the teacher’s side I’ve often seen this. The chap’s come up and he’s got something that works. So he starts exploiting that and he doesn’t make any further progress. But that’s not what you want as a teacher. You don’t want him showing off what he can do. You want him developing something more difficult where he’s going to fail and look a fool.

But he doesn’t want that.

So from a teacher’s point of view those successes are nothing – they are a positive hindrance. Sometimes, when a pupil loyally tries something very difficult, he find himself being smashed with the counters and made to look an absolute idiot.

Some of these throws have got to be a hundred per-cent; you fail if you can only manage ten per-cent, you fail when you can only manage sixty per-cent, you fail when you only manage ninety per-cent. Well, the pupil can’t see that. All he knows is, ‘There I go, flat on my back again.’

But the teacher sees it. Speaking as someone who has taught, it’s very difficult to convey that to pupils…extremely difficult.

Perhaps this may help you as pupils.