A

More on Teacher Strategy 301

Add now the fact that the Teacher person usually acquires the raw
materials for thinking by reading what others have thought in the past.
They were objective, he also prefers to remain objective, and that is the
way it stays. It takes great courage, initiative, and extended dedication by
some individual, somewhere, to gain tools for Teacher thought which are
even moderately useful.
Finally, I suggest that the Teacher storage shed becomes most
serviceable when it contains elements which have appropriate emotional
labels. This also is a major problem. Some of you may be wondering at
this point, “What does he mean by putting an emotional label on ideas and
theories? I didn‟t know that ideas and feelings actually could go together.”
Exactly. Now you notice what we are up against. So, let us see if we can
put together some basic concepts.

Three requirements for a properly functioning Teacher „storage shed‟:

1) It must be filled with content.

 Many Teacher persons protect their theories by avoiding content.

2) The content must be useful.

 Most Teacher persons study theories which ignore personal life.

3 ) The content must be labeled with a feeling for generality.

 Today‟s specialists emphasize the specific and ignore the general.

The ideas and theories which most of us encounter in today‟s world
tend to be fragmented bits of information, almost like items in a game of
Trivial Pursuit. When we need a certain concept, we go to our mental filing
cabinet and pull out the correct shred of knowledge: the address or phone
number of a person, the birthday and personal preferences of a friend, the
shopping list for the grocery store, or the pile of papers in our IN box at
work. These various bits of information acquire varying labels of Perceiver
confidence—we know some things very well, in other areas we are not as
certain.
The result is a complex mind, filled to bursting with unrelated facts—it
suffers from a condition known as „infoglut.‟ Often we wish that we lived
in the past when times were simpler, and life had order. However, I suggest
that the problem is not complexity, but rather a lack of order within the
complexity. If we looked for connections between these individual items,
then Teacher thought would begin to „see the light,‟ and we would actually
feel good about the complexity. When this happens, it is like the image of a
bulb glowing above a person‟s head. There is a sudden „Aha,‟ things fit
together, we get the big picture. The end result is a positive Teacher
emotion.
This is the type of emotional label that gets attached to information
lying within the Teacher storage shed—it is a feeling that relates to its
generality. Each Teacher item acquires an emotion corresponding to the