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The Teacher We Think We Need
One of the earliest memories I have of learning is not really about what was being taught. It is about the person standing at the front of the room.
They seemed to possess something I did not. Knowledge, authority, confidence. A quiet certainty that made the space feel already decided before anything was said.
And my role, as it appeared to me, was simply to receive that certainty without disrupting it.
No one ever explicitly explained this arrangement. It was not a rule written down or spoken aloud. It was simply the atmosphere of learning itself, something absorbed before it could be questioned.
Later, when I became a teacher myself, I stepped quite naturally into that same atmosphere.
I taught dance across multiple disciplines and styles on and off over several years. Later, I spent many years teaching English as a Second Language in South Korea. The two experiences would ultimately lead me in very different directions. But when I first became a dance teacher, I stepped quite naturally into the familiar role of the teacher who was expected to know, demonstrate, and guide from a place of expertise.
The role came with an unspoken expectation: I was meant to have the answers. My job was to demonstrate, correct, explain, and gradually transfer something from myself into someone else. Learning appeared to move in one direction, from teacher to student. Or so I believed.
To be fair, it was never consciously chosen as a philosophy. It came instead from my own experience of learning dance: a model absorbed through repetition rather than deliberate choice.