Introduction

    Teaching from within. Talking about teaching, we have to face three factors: students, subjects, ourselves. Knowing my students and subjects depends heavily on self-knowledge. When I don’t know myself, I cannot know who my students are. Same as the subjects. Reform education is to reform Teachers, the human heart!

    “What”: what subjects to teach?
    “How”: how to teach? Methods and techniques
    “Why”: for what purpose we teach?
    “Who”: who is the self that teach? The inner landscape of the teaching self (intellectual, emotional, spiritual)

I The heart of a teacher
    Identity and integrity in teaching

    Good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; Good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher.

    One student cannot describe her good teacher, but she can describe her bad teachers because they are all same: their words float somewhere in front of their faces. They distance themselves from students and subjects. Good teachers are able to weave a complex web of connection among themselves, students and subjects using their HEART, where intellect, emotion and spirit converge. The courage to teach is to courage to weave such web.

    The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and in human responsibility.
Vaclav Havel, first president of Czech Republic.

    What was it about you that allowed great mentoring to happen? Since mentoring is a mutuality that requires more than meeting the right teacher: the teacher must meet the right student. Seek mentor, encounter mentor, become mentor.

II A culture of fear
    Education and the disconnected life

    The fear of the live encounter is actually a consequence of fears that begins in the fear of diversity. If we embrace diversity, we find ourselves on the doorstep of our next fear: fear of conflict that will ensue when divergent truths meet. (lose-win competition). If we peel back our fear of conflict, we found a third layer of fear, the fear of losing identity.

    Fear can be also healthy. “What gives value to travel is fear”

    Teacher complaint students just like Doctor say: “Don’t send us any more sick people. Send us healthy patient so we can look like good Doctor”

    Students who come to the classroom alive and will become passive consumers of knowledge and are dead on departure when they graduate

    Student from Hell story: he help Dr. Palmer understand that the silent and seemingly sullen students in our classrooms are no brain-dead: they are full of fear.

    The behaviors generated by fear: silence, withdrawal, cynicism

    The teacher’s fear heart. We cannot see fears in students until we see fears in ourselves. Our fearful way of knowing: How do we know what do we know? And by what warrant can we call our knowledge true?

    Dictatorship, anarchy, Objectivism. Objective detachment, subjective intimacy. Barbara McClintock : Dissolve the boundary between object and observer

III The hidden wholeness
    Paradox in teaching and learning

    The culture of disconnection that undermines teaching and learning is driven partly by fear, also by our western commitment to thinking in polarities (binary thinking)
    Technique, teacher’s identity and integrity
    Objective knowledge, subjective engagement
    The power of intellect, the power of emotion

    We fragment reality into endless series of either-ors. In a phrase, we think the world apart. This think destroys the wholeness and wonder of life.

    The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth. (一个正确陈述的反面是一个错误的陈述，然而一个真理的反面，也许是一个另一个真理。Neils Bohr) Neils Bohr define a concept that is essential to thinking the world together – the concept of paradox.
    In certain circumstance, truth is not either-ors, but both-and.
    Profound truth, rather than Empirical fact, is the stuff of which paradoxes are made.
    Human self is paradox , breath, inhale, exhale
    When a person is healthy and whole, the head and the heart are both-and, not either-ors.

    Human beings were made for relationships: without a rich and nourishing network of connections, we wither and die. At the same time, we are made for solitude. Our equal and opposite needs for solitude and community constitute a great paradox.

    In a culture that rips paradox apart, many people know nothing of the rich dialectic of solitude and community; they know only a daily whiplash between loneliness and the crowd.

    Paradoxical thinking requires that we embrace a view of the world in which opposite is joined, so that we can see the world clearly and see it whole. Such a view is characterized by neither flinty-eyed realism nor dewy-eyed romanticism but rather by a creative synthesis of the two.

IV Knowing in community
    Jointed by the grace of great things



V Teaching in community
    A subjected-centered education

    Watch a teacher sitting in the center of the classroom and reading a book about elephant for five-year old children. View through the eyes of the kids, it is possible that the elephant is likely in the center of the circle.

    一颗沙里看出一个世界，to see a world in a grain of sand
    一朵野花里一座天堂，and a heaven in a wild flower
    把无限放在你的手掌上，hold infinite in the palm of your hand
    永恒在一刹那里收藏。And eternity in an hour
    from “Auguries of Innocence” by William blake

VI Learning in community
    The conversation of colleagues

VII Divided no more
    Teaching from a heart of hope

    No punishment anyone lays on you could possibly be worse than the punishment you lay on yourself by conspiring in your own diminishment

    Release yourself from the cell that have been locked by yourself