ArcaNuova · Education · Late understanding
The teacher I never liked
Sometimes, looking back, school sounds like one long imposition: getting up too early, sitting too long, memorising too much, understanding too little.
And yes, some of it was exactly that.
But perhaps not all teachers were bad. Perhaps at the time we simply did not yet know what all that isolated knowledge would one day be good for.
At school one often receives individual parts: dates, shapes, colours, grammar, perspective, formulas, rules, lines, angles, stories. At first everything lies around like screws, wall plugs and pieces of wood on a building site where no one has yet shown the plan.
No wonder one becomes dissatisfied.
Isolated knowledge without context rarely makes anyone happy. It feels like work without a purpose. Only later does one notice: some things first had to be learned separately so that one day they could connect.
Connections are not recognised because one wants them.
They are recognised when enough details lie in the mind.
There were teachers who could convey that. My art teacher was one of them.
He did not empty anything out. He filled something. Not loudly, not intrusively, not with grand theatre. He conveyed structure. Measure. Proportion. Harmony. The quiet imposition that a line must be right before it can be beautiful.
At the time I did not know what I would ever need that for.
Today it appears again. In a house. In a room. In a website. In a logo. In an Ark that should not merely float somehow, but must also look right.
And suddenly one notices: some teachers do not teach for the next exam. Some place something inside you that becomes visible only decades later.
Of course there were also the others.
Teachers who taught less than they performed themselves. People standing at the front apparently believing that the blackboard was a stage and the pupils were the audience for their unresolved personality issues.
I did not like one of them at all.
Not his manner.
Not his attitude.
Not the feeling that it was less about us than about himself.
Back then it annoyed me.
Today I see it differently.
Not more mildly.
Only more clearly.
I learned from him too. Not how I wanted to be. But how I never wanted to become.
Bad teachers were role models as well. Only with the sign reversed. They showed what happens when authority becomes more important than mediation. When someone uses their position to appear larger instead of allowing others to grow.
A good teacher shows a path.
A bad teacher shows a boundary.
And sometimes one needs both.
Perhaps school was not simply good or bad. Perhaps it was a storeroom full of individual parts: some rusty, some crooked, some valuable, some entirely incomprehensible at the time.
But years later one suddenly stands before one’s own project, takes an old tool from that inner storeroom and thinks:
Ah.
So that is what it was for.
Perhaps that is real education. Not only what one understands immediately. But what later prevents one from becoming arbitrary.
