Esoteric to Exoteric: Learning/teaching/culture. Learning Activity
A teacher's activity and the activity of a student both have esoteric facets. Nevertheless, most of us have important understandings of both learning and teaching.
A teacher arranges data, facts, information, and knowledge for students to do the same for themselves and for others. Also a teacher aims aims to avoid damaging a student's motivation. It's the transmission of culture.
A teacher helps students to use logic, definitions, and analysis to their benefit and the benefit of their world. Who was it that said teaching is easy?
Good teacher's words are often like tiny seeds which may be held in many different hands and are pregnant with meaning. A simple utterance, like "The beginning is half of the whole." may confuse one for a time, but later help that one through difficult times.
A teacher's words may be powerful and impart power, and being so, also be dangerous. A good teacher offers them as tiny, easily controlled sparks which may, in time, spark a productive fire which makes a smith's fire seem small.
To be a truly good learner or disciple, is to be heard by the teacher. Too be heard the pupil must speak. The teacher is a reacher. A teacher wants to extend himself or herself to the learner. Good teachers and good students must both be good listeners. Good listening is not easy. That good teacher wants to be prompt to hear, to listen, and to understand. A hard job, a difficult one. But, first the disciple must speak; often not an easy task. Even so it is best that the disciple speak well. Disciple and master desire to retain and preserve in memory the better part of that which is heard and to understand it. Each interprets and probably reinterprets.
A good student dismisses nothing which is taught until the the rudiments are mastered. It can sometimes seem much to swallow. But one does well to first try to ingest or create a kind of framework for those rudiments. It's okay to swallow a bit of framework; try it you may like it. I once thought of it as a set of hooks that I could hang stuff on and not let it just fall out of my mind. It an organizing feature early on. I could hang similar stuff on the same hook or on near hooks. They were there for me to use, check out, and from time to time to say something like, "Ah, I see!
Sometimes just one interesting fact or piece of information may be held as a kind of magnet for related information until some organization emerges. That organization can be the beginning of one of a student's frameworks. That framework as a student owns it, ought to be kept flexible. A student may come to love a "framework" that has proven useful in her life only to find she has to let go of it and to replace it with one more realistic. Learning can be difficult and relearning no easier.
As life goes on, a learner may find that he has made useful places to hang, some say attach, new information and new understandings of a similar or corresponding nature. He may find hat he has created a place to do analysis.
As one observes one's learning one may see something like the above happening much on its own. Co-operating with that happening can often be a productive practice.
The good teacher may offer a ready-made framework as part of a lesson on, say, analysis. The good student is grateful.
Thank you for reading.
rcs