Instead, teachers who are not shit rely on everything from superior mental models, through experience, through their own failings, to help the student better understand what they're doing.
If the student is more talented, the norm is they exceed the master. If not, it depends.
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eh, I had a student who exceeded me in a specific domain (energetic states) and I recognized it and sent them to another teacher. One must know ones limitations. And, ultimately, one should want ones students to exceed one.
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Probably overstated my case a bit, here.
But still, I'd say teaching ability is predicated on other things than one's own ability. Many of the best teachers are not *that* accomplished themselves. I believe you're the most recent person to tell me that, too.
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As I stated earlier, you know things that I don't know and you can thus teach me those things - but you also have much more metacognitive context for all the things we both know, which provides its own kind of value.
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If two people have gone equally far into the forest but one has a more complete map (& more relevant misc. knowledge, e.g. reading stars), that person still has an advantage they can leverage.
I meant something along those lines, I think.
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I find the openness of your responses as you interesting as the content of the responses.
In lieu of other measures, I picked my two primary teacher according to their seniority (5+ decades), and a willingness to translate their training into a new context.
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Your response - and other teachers I’ve asked similar questions - suggests that whilst seniority/realisation is really important for serious students, there are other factors which could have a disproportionately determinate role, on the side of both student and teacher.
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I’m really not sure by what metrics a student should measure a prospective teacher by, but I suspect it is a combination of traditional training, apparent knowledge, and applicable wisdom in dialogue.
Anyway thanks for responses. I was just curious about your ideas in this area.
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On the face of it that makes sense...but looking back I’ve learnt things that certainly weren’t worth learning, although I didn’t know that at the time and may have never found out.
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Yeah, but then there is the additional problem: are you qualified, in any capacity, to say if a teacher is good or not, or are you kidding yourself?
I think we are all kidding ourselves at least some of the time, on that particular topic.
I take the advice of a wiser man than I on this - there are always much bigger fish in the sea, and today’s enlightenment is tomorrow’s mistake. Best to attempt to find well trained teachers (w/ lots of retreat time) and learn until it’s clear that they’re reliably inappropriate.
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