Are you ready to see?

 Teachers point things out.  Are you ready to see?  Ready to listen?

Yesterday, Terry Bruns witnessed a convo between Kate and me.  Kate was worried that she gave too many As this semester.  Terry said, after Kate left, "Isn't it a shame that teachers who are so good doubt themselves so much?"  Kate is a veteran, well-respected.  I didn't hear her concern as "self-doubt" and that I should consider addressing that in a positive way as a Department Chair. 

Only when Terry points it out do I see it.  In that moment, she is my teacher.

Being a teacher is 'pointing things out" so that students can see the world (writing, literature, self-regulation, etc.)

But what prepares someone to listen, to see?  Why was I not able to hear Kate, but able to hear Terry?

Thoreau writes in many different ways that we see what we are prepared to see.

A man receives only what he is ready to receive, whether physically or intellectually or morally, as animals conceive at certain seasons their kind only. We hear and apprehend only what we already half know. If there is something which does not concern me, which is out of my line, which by experience or by genius my attention is not drawn to, however novel and remarkable it may be, if it is spoken, we hear it not, if it is written, we read it not, or if we read it, it does not detain us. Every man thus tracks himself through life, in all his hearing and reading and observation and traveling. His observations make a chain. The phenomenon or fact that cannot in any wise be linked with the rest which he has observed, he does not observe. By and by we may be ready to receive what we cannot receive now. I find, for example, in Aristotle some thing about the spawning, etc., of the pout and perch, because I know something about it already and have my attention aroused; but I do not discover till very late that he has made other equally important observations on the spawning of other fishes, because I am not interested in those fishes.

As I reread this selection, I note not only the italicized part, also also the "Every man thus tracks himself through life, in all his hearing and reading and observation and traveling.  His observations make a chain" and "By and by we may be ready to receive what we cannot receive now."  The three separate sentences strike me as three different and important ideas.

1. something about prior knowledge and interest as prerequisites for learning
2. our journals, our creative works create a track (see below), like an animal leaves a track in the forest (and so we SHOULD write what we think and see now) (this seems linked to Emerson's ideas about trusting our silent thought and speaking our thought now, even if it's different tomorrow)
3. these tracks are linked together (a chain)
4. in the future, we might have ears/eyes for other things 

Returning to the beginning of the post...  how do we identify who are teachers are?  how do we stay open to them?  

Below:

Related, Austin Kleon just blogged how in creative work, we "chain smoke" or have a "chain reaction"

In Show Your Work! I wrote about a way of working I call “chain smoking”: lighting the beginning of one project up with the end of another.

“We work because it’s a chain reaction,” Charles Eames said.

Each piece leads to the next.