The Shape of Teaching, The Weight of Learning

つめたい朝
しかられて目が覚めた
でもありがとう
cold morning silence
a scolding woke me gently
still—I say thank you

—

Some teachers meet you where you are. Others wait for you at the top of a mountain you didn’t even know you were climbing.

I was sixteen when I met the first one. Second year of gimnazija, in Celje. A small classroom with scratched desks and that unexplainable smell of chalk dust and adolescent panic. Mathematics, 7:10 a.m., Tuesday. The teacher walked in with the posture of someone who had seen thousands of excuses and didn’t care for any of them.

That first week I didn’t do my homework. I don’t remember why. Probably didn’t feel like it. She looked over her glasses at me and wrote a grade into her little square notebook. No drama. No lecture. Just a cold stamp of reality.

Second week, same thing—this time I tried to answer the question at the board and stumbled. Another grade, neatly penned. She didn’t yell, didn’t mock me, didn’t sigh. Just recorded the result.

It was the silence that got me.

There’s a kind of dignity in being held accountable without punishment. She let me fail with precision. No anger. No disappointment. Just truth.

At the time, I hated it.

—

I don’t remember the turning point exactly, but I do remember the game I started playing in my head. I called it “Don’t Give Her The Satisfaction.” It involved trying to understand equations, logic, functions before she could ask me. I started doing homework, not for school, but for the quiet thrill of not being caught unprepared. I started practicing formulas like I practiced skate tricks—again and again until they stuck, until I could land them without thinking.

Eventually, my grades changed. Then something else changed. Her tone. There was a moment—I still remember this—where she walked past my desk, glanced at the homework I’d left out, and said, “Good.”

That was it. Just “Good.”
But it hit harder than a medal.

Because it was earned.

—

Looking back, I see what she was doing. She didn’t reward effort. She rewarded precision. Not perfection, but clarity. If you worked hard and didn’t get it, she’d show you. If you didn’t work, she’d show you, too. Both with equal calm. What I resented back then, I now recognize as one of the greatest acts of discipline a teacher can offer: consistency.

And that’s the thing about good teachers.

They’re not here to entertain you.
They’re not here to be liked.
They’re here to build your spine.

—

Many years later, I was in Birmingham.
A different country. A different system. Different kinds of chalk dust, I suppose.

Here, I met another teacher—but this one didn’t carry notebooks of precise judgment. He was more like a gardener. Gently disorganized, always late, and somehow always asking the right questions.

He was a mentor in the way good jazz is a teacher—you have to listen more than you play.

He let me explore. Gave me too much room at times. But every now and then, he’d say something like, “You can go as far as you want. But bring something back.”

He wasn’t grading performance. He was grading curiosity.

—

What these two had in common was something I didn’t understand until much later: they both knew when to let me stumble. But more than that, they knew how to shape the stumble into learning.

One did it through rigor. The other, through space.

Both worked.

—

Somewhere between those two classrooms, I discovered something else: that learning isn’t just about input.

There’s this concept I came across in a book about animal training, strangely enough. It said, “You don’t train with punishment. You train with consistent signals. With rewards that shape behavior.”

You can’t just push. You have to pull, guide, shape.
Reinforce what works. Ignore what doesn’t.
Even in yourself.

—

I started applying that to my own learning.
I stopped cramming. I started teaching what I learned to others.
Output. Output. Output.

Suddenly, knowledge wasn’t just a collection.
It was a rhythm.
And once you find the rhythm, learning becomes a dance.

—

Back in Celje, I once got a full mark on a math test.

I handed it in quietly. No big deal. But after class, the teacher called me over. She looked at my paper, then looked at me, and for the first time in two years, she smiled—not just politely, but like she saw something she was waiting to see.

“You worked for this,” she said.

And I nodded. Not out of pride. But out of recognition. Because she was right. I had worked. And because she had waited, I learned how to build something inside myself.

—

Wabi-sabi isn’t just about broken bowls and gentle imperfection.

It’s also about teachers.

The ones who shape you without softening you.
The ones who see not what you are, but what you could become—if you’re willing to endure the quiet burn of repetition, of failure, of eventually getting it.

That’s what great teaching is.
And that’s what great living is, too.

—

Some days, I still hear her voice in my head when I take shortcuts.
Other days, I remember my Birmingham mentor’s calm.
Between them, a balance: form and freedom.

And maybe that’s the whole lesson.

We need both.
Structure and space.
Correction and encouragement.
Precision and play.

—

A good teacher holds the mirror steady while you squint into it, terrified of what you might see.
A great one lets you look long enough to see the person you could become.

—

If you’re lucky, you’ll meet one.
If you’re luckier, you’ll become one.

But only after you’ve learned to teach yourself.

—

The lesson isn’t just the answer.
It’s how you arrived.
How many wrong turns you took.
How much silence you sat through.
And how deeply you listened when no one was watching.

—

That’s what she taught me.
And it’s still teaching me now.