Teaching is a particularly frustrating art, mostly because it's so often impossible to choose who your students are. So many young people these days are being raised to shy away from challenges that it can be very frustrating to try to teach them in a classroom, because they don't respond well at all to being asked to better themselves, to learn more, to improve their skills. But what I find to be a pretty common phenomenon is that once I do start to challenge them, once I do start to ask them to be better than they were yesterday, they respond quite well--most students really want to get better, and they're simply hoping that someone will help them to improve their skills and knowledge. I know a lot of teachers who really never ask young people to do any difficult work, thus dooming them to stay at their current level. But when we ask them to stretch their limits and offer them a safe place to do so--free from ridicule and mocking--they find within themselves the resources they need to get better at what they do, to improve both their knowledge and their skills. If we want people to be better, Goethe said, we have to treat them as if they already are the people they have the potential to be, rather than dooming them to mediocrity by only expecting them to perform at levels that they've already reached.
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