Parents, Teachers, and Students Balance Educational Responsibilities

Like most teachers, I enter into the instructional relationship with such immense commitment that it feels to me like being a second parent.  The reciprocal exchange between a teacher and a student is not complete without the real parents being on board.  Alternately, the same is true with the exchange between parent and teacher or the parent and the student.  Education works best when the third party carries as much weight as any other.  When that balance is thrown off, the value of the participation shrinks unless adjustments are made by all three.  Good communication will bring that to light.

Understanding that there are communication problems in the best of relationships, it is best to double efforts to understand one another.  Part of one's efforts to connect and complete the circle of communication will unintentionally miss its target.  One party may not hear it, or understand a message the way it was intended.  A listener may not even realize they have slipped off in their efforts to be cued in; and still may not remember fully.  Furthermore, one's definition of understanding may differ.  We all know people who think you understand them only when you agree with them or change your viewpoint to accommodate their wishes.

When teaching / raising a child into taking on knowledge and responsibility, there are bound to be different approaches.  When I was young, I thought the differences would be confusing for a child and set them up for inconsistencies.  As I have matured, I realize children are resilient and can work with different parameters with different people and actually gain more from the varied approaches they inevitably experience.

Parents', teachers' and students' messages can be different; communication styles can vary, but understanding is the tricky part to make the connection complete.  Everyone in the circle wants to be understood and wants to understand.  It is insecurities that can camouflage any one of the key people into the appearance of arrogance, reluctance or indifference which sets up road blocks to good communication.  Understanding and allowing for insecurities will bring down those walls, engaging those involved back to a willingness to work together.

Every person in the circle of communication is a human being worthy of the effort to communicate.  In the end most people gain from exchanges in perspective and sharing actions.  If not, it is okay to disagree and carry on to those thing where you do agree.   Productive communication is essential for learning to take place.

The Lily-of-The-Valley Lesson

For years, I have been bringing some Lily-of-The-Valley flowers into my youth division ballet classes with the hope to inspire my students' sense of beauty beyond princesses and fairies.  The flowers' fragrance alone is captivating.  Their appearance is unique among flowers, but not among the principles of construction and growth.

The children and I breath-in the perfume to understand that beauty extends beyond what we capture with our vision.  Together, we discover that all our senses contribute to a sense of beauty.  Then we try to incorporate all our senses into our dance so we can engage an audience and fellow cast members in breathing, seeing, and feeling movement with us as we dance.

My students and I look at the hierarchical structure of the largest bell flower that opens first at the bottom of the stem and leads to blossoms of diminishing size as it grows taller.... much like the progression of learning.  People appear to learn the most quantity at introductory stages and later learn smaller detailed amounts that depend on their earlier foundation.

Lastly, we look inside to see that six petals have merged into one formation creating a bell shape around a center point, not dissimilar to the way individual corps de ballet dancers move in space and time to create one image around a soloist.

Nature teaches us about beauty; then, we dance with it!