What Can You Tell Your Students?

That depends on what kind of students you have!

Some students want you to do things - they don’t want to hear a lot of talk.

Whereas other students need to understand, they really do. For my actors – this is an EnneaType V. Time spent talking with this kind of person - about why you do what you do - will engage them more in your process. It is constructive learning time.

Today’s Daily is inspired by my dearest friend Greg Holdaway -  I wrote about him earlier this week – who is visiting Japan to run a series of science-orientated Alexander workshops for ZEN PLACE.

https://www.bodymindspiritresearchlab.com/workshops/737 (Japanese)

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Greg is a person who likes explanations – that’s why he’s a scientist and long-time teacher trainer of Alexander’s Discoveries. We were on a call in my Tokyo apartment this morning with David Anderson*, a leading scientist in San Francisco on the motor development of children – and the concept of “AFFORDANCES” came up.

AFFORDANCES? 

That’s what I thought. I didn’t know what they were!

David offered a definition: “AFFORDANCES are opportunities for action”, and our motor system is full of them. See a chair and we can, well, see opportunities to sit on it, teach an Alexander lesson, use it to sing ‘I’m Singing in the Rain’ or throw it out the window. 

Which one would you choose?

At some stage, we start losing creative options; we define how to use our environment and some creativity is lost. Children overcome this tendency by a combination of ignorance and play. Play for all species is Nature’s way of discovering new AFFORDANCES that may develop our abilities. 

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Well – that was a long rabbit hole, illustrating how Greg, David and I – and other people - love to deep-dive into Alexander’s work. Remember – some of your students want you to talk. They want you to explain. If you don’t feed their need for that, they may go away…

How can you recognise someone like that?

Often, they are quiet people. They like listening, reading and watching. They collect information because it makes them feel secure. Weirdly, they want to feel they know more than you about something, but they don’t want you to know that they know more. They want to keep that part secret. The secret is their security blanket.

It’s one reason why they love collecting things. In Chekhov’s play Seagull, the character Trigorin – a writer – is constantly collecting new expressions to use in his novels.

Look out for that student and ensure you satisfy their intellectual needs. Give them reading to do, and ask them questions about last week’s lesson. Engage them by how they enjoy being engaged, and they will speak highly of Alexander!

* David I Anderson co-authored a standard textbook, “Motor Learning and Control: Concepts and Applications”, for neuroscience undergraduates at major universities. He was also a keynote speaker at the International Congress of the Alexander Technique in Berlin in August 2022. You can view his contribution (70 minutes) at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aZa4ATiuSQ