A

More on Teacher Strategy 311

having to say things like „purplish-red‟ and use the much more subtle term
of „magenta.‟ Sure, a person with a vocabulary of one thousand words can
usually get his ideas across, but imagine having to use exactly the same
simple words over and over again. Yuck.
Would you like to read this book, for instance, if I used the same words
and the same groups of words again and again all the way through the book
and made you read the same words all the way through the book? I think
that you would not like my words and that you would stop reading this
book and read another book.
Moving on to our second point, I have suggested that the Mercy person
loathes insincerity. When people transmit mixed emotional messages, this
presents the Mercy storage shed with conflicting information and causes its
retrieval mechanism to misfire: “Who is this guy? Is he good or bad?
Where is he coming from? What is he really like?”
Similarly, I suggest that the Teacher person despises double-
mindedness. An individual who is double-minded shifts between
conflicting theories, usually motivated by a desire to please his current
„audience.‟ His ideas have no consistency; his world view changes from
moment to moment. As a result, the Teacher storage shed retrieval
apparatus malfunctions; it will not know how to communicate with this
person, or how to interpret his behavior. Like the Mercy person, the
Teacher person will often respond to this type of situation by running
away: “Get me out of here. That individual is sick in the head. His thinking
is totally warped.”
The Teacher person will often have major conflicts with the Facilitator
person over exactly this issue. The Facilitator individual, as we will see,
looks at details and adapts his responses to the situation. The Facilitator
person who lacks internal content does not realize that his mental fine-
tuning is causing his subconscious Teacher theories to drift all over the
map. The Teacher person does notice this inconsistency, and can end up
abhorring A the unstable Facilitator as someone who is less than human.
Finally, we saw that the presence of automatic thought gives the Mercy
person a desire for emotional novelty. I suggest that the same need appears
within the Teacher person: He longs for new Teacher feelings. The
Teacher person who goes to a party may sit on the sidelines, waiting for
someone to say something significant. The whole evening may pass with
him speaking scarcely a word. He wanted to converse, but everyone talked
about nothing. For the whole time, the Teacher person encountered only
empty concepts, meaningless specifics, worn-out ideas and poorly formed
theories. Suddenly the night was over and nothing had happened; no new
information had been added to the storage shed of Teacher thought. When

A This is a strong word, but the Teacher person does think emotionally.