Love Your Students

Consider it carefully. This phrase could be taken as an injunction were I to add an exclamation mark. I could also have used 'for' to make the meaning more easily discernable. But I have done neither of these things because this is neither an order nor a suggestion. It is, perhaps a question, but not in the syntax … in the juxtaposition.
Each word here has many meanings in itself and thus the way each word works with those around it throws up a surprising number of combinations of meaning. A little like the 8 forces, the 5 steps, the 64 hexagrams and the 10,000 things.
We all have our own perspective, our own map of the territory, so we will each have a penchant for one of the possible interpretations of those words, "Love Your Students". And of course one interpretation would be that I'm joking. Another would be that I'm putting words into someone else's mouth, or playing with parody.
What does the phrase mean to you?
Love, of course, is "a many-splendoured thing", whatever that means. Indeed, discussions of the meaning of love seem to me characterised by vagueness. "Love your fellow man", "Fatherly love", "the love of a child for its parents", "Jesus loves you", "The Art of Love", “Making Love”, "Art and Love in medieval France", "The Love shop", “They love each other (once every Friday evening)”. All these phrases throw up different visions of whatever-the-hell-it-is we're talking about here. OK, so let's take "Your" - a straightforward possessive pronoun implying ownership. But maybe not with "Students", because you're not allowed to own people in most of the world, and we can assume that the reference to Students is a reference to people. Indeed, given the context, a reference to people who study the noble art of Tai Chi Chuan. We put these two words together however and contorsions and explosions are bound to arise.
A student does not belong to anyone, but is typically associated, at a given time, with one teacher or school. A lot of my basic training in London was given by Steve Wooster and Godfrey Dornelly, but I was Dan's student, wasn't I? I learnt from Dan after spending two years with one of his first students, the good(ish) Ian McMillan, he who went off the rails (yet another one). But there was no confusion since the one followed the other chronologically, like one marriage may another. But what if I am bigamous, or more, and am learning simultaneously from a number of people? Whose student am I then? Well, I belong to all of them I suppose. A child may belong to a family and not just one member of it…
The question underlying this piece then, is – what kind of a relationship can a teacher have with his/her students? The Sifu, the teaching father, presumably feels fatherly love. The humanist feels human love – being for being as it were. There are also numerous cases of less platonic loving and sometimes I wonder what kind of ‘rencontre’ certain people are seeking at ‘Rencontres Jasnières’ – and sometimes I don’t have to wonder.
Personally I’ve always felt that ‘love’ between student and teacher is not helpful to the pedagogic experience. Inevitably there’s a question of just what one is trying to achieve here and this is one place where opinions may vary. I’ve always been trying to get people in touch with their own kinesthetic competences and transfer the body of techniques and theory that I’ve learnt myself. For others (and sometimes for me too), there’s a whole social side to Tai Chi classes which naturally extends to the bar next door, perhaps the restaurant down the street, and who knows - maybe “plus si affinité”! I am not only a teacher but also (on my better days anyway) a human being. I can fully understand this chain of events. But I don’t go for it – I seem to have some weird pseudo-Confucian idea that a teacher really is a sifu-like person, and this implies a certain distance. I don’t believe I’m right about this however. Though it is common knowledge that, like psychotherapy, it is the crazies that do Tai Chi, so better stay out of those ‘Basic Instinct’ situations: full-contact is enough!
However, I also accept that definitions of love are naturally vague since different kinds of love may be present at the same time. Two people, in love, would normally be able to entertain feelings of human empathy as well. There are cases too where love may be defined from a sexual base, leading on to “higher things” (yes, vague stuff again, I know) or alternatively the other way round, where the sex is an expression of … er … god? And for some I’m sure it’s between those two extremes, or can vary according to the season, the day, the time.
Finally then, for anyone who feels like being a “pygmy detractor”, no I generally don’t have sex with my students (not all at the same time). Indeed, I would get quite guilty about that kind of thing. Now, other people’s students are of course fair game. I do not have anything to say about the doings of others. I do sometimes think to myself things like “lucky git – how does she/he do it?”, and other times my perspective will be very different. I don’t want the same thing all the time. Love is totally vague. No students are mine, but I am bound and may be binding. This is the dilemma of choice and not choice.