4 types of teaching

I’ve been teaching juggling lessons for a few years.  My mom has been in public education all my life and my dad does sports training. I pay attention to how people learn and especially to why they’re bummed out by other teachers.  Here are 4 types of teaching…

1. Sloth = You treat teaching like it’s a tough thing that you don’t really want to be doing. Your energy transfers to your students more than your knowledge, so you’re making more people feel like they’re wasting their time.
2. Monkey = Try to teach people to do what you do based on what you THINK you do. The trouble with this is that you don’t know what you do and from a master’s perspective, the way you do everything is different now than when you learned.
3. Parrot = Repeat and teach exactly the way you were taught.  Doesn’t leave room for progress. If you had a bad teacher, you’ll be a bad teacher. If you had a good teacher, they would be disappointed in you.
4. Raccoon = Resourceful and cunning, you see the goal — for the student to learn the thing — then you do whatever it takes to get the student to the goal. I guess the downside of this is that you have to put a lot of energy into being engaged and you won’t feel perfectly confident all the time.  The results are worth it. I’m a raccoon.