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Tutoring - A Tutor's Perspective
(First published in the Green Lion - Spring 1999)
"The meeting of two personalities is like the contact
of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction,
both are transformed." - C. G. Jung
I have now been tutoring students online for the Guild since February of this year, so almost 8 months. In this time I have had 9 students who have actually started training, and out of these 3 have just started and 1 has currently had his training suspended (by mutual agreement) while his general living situation is taken care of.
The opportunity to tutor students has been a great benefit to my own training. It has allowed me to see tuition from the perspective of the tutor, and how much of my own behaviour must have looked (the good and the bad). So in this respect students act as a kind of mirror – at the end of the day human behaviours are reasonably predictable, so especially having just been through probation and apprenticeship myself it is interesting to see students acting in similar to ways to myself or others I went through this part of my training with. For me personally, I find that when I must judge another persons behaviour, I inevitably end up judging my own behaviour also – reflecting on my own faults and bad behaviours.
The biggest benefit of tutoring a student is that it means you have to be able to actually explain the subject matter to someone, in a clear, concise and logical form. It is always a good test of how well you understand something to have to explain it to someone else. Of course, in occultism there are many things you can tell a student, time and time again in fact, but until they come to certain realisations for themselves they do not understand it anyway.
It is also good to have to go over the Probationary lessons again for oneself. New insights are often found from re-reading these, both because of what has been learned and experienced since, and also from the comments and questions students ask – as they all add something of their own perspective to each lesson. It is not uncommon for a student to question a point that I have not really thought about, or view it in a completely different light (whether rightly or wrongly so).
There are also occasions (many at the moment) when I end up tutoring a student who is more knowledgeable than myself in one or many aspects of the occult, or who exhibit signs that they are more ‘advanced’ in their esoteric development (or at least one or more aspects of their development) than myself. This is an interesting situation, one which makes one wonder who should be tutoring who! However, the only way this can be approached by the tutor is with honesty. As a tutor I am both only human, and only skilled in what I have studied and experienced. I am not an all-knowing “master”, so the only thing I have over all students is that I know the Guild’s system of study better than they do. This then is my role, to guide them in learning the techniques and background knowledge (as a framework) to aid them in their own development. A tutor cannot enlighten the student, only guide them, offering them advice, and techniques to use to learn and experience things for themselves.
Something that many students don’t realise, and perhaps take for granted, as I did myself, was the amount of time and effort a tutor actually takes in dealing with a student. Online, be it via email or IRC, many hours are spent in discussion with students. Especially when situations arise, some kind of ‘crisis’ during training where the tutor spends many hours away from his own studies, family, or relaxation time, to deal with the student, often knowing that even after all the talking is done, the student will end up quitting anyway.
For me, hardest thing is spending a lot of time and effort dealing with a student, building up a student-teacher relationship (and even some form of friendship), then having the student suddenly end their training (sometimes when they are doing well at it too), often without any word as to why. It is also difficult when a student misbehaves, and has to be threatened with having their tuition terminated. Often it is clear that before long the student will either need to have their training stopped, or they will quit anyway because they are not getting their own way.
Overall though, I realise that tutoring students is a very necessary task. It is a way of paying back the Order and my tutor for the time and effort that was spent on my own tuition, and is the only way to ensure the continuation of the Order, by increasing the number of members. Tuition within our system is for the lazy or those who would choose to by their ‘enlightenment’ by mail-order, so it really relies on the more advanced students to provide the newer students with the opportunity to gain skills and experience for themselves, so they can eventually pass on their knowledge to successive ‘generations’.
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