Perhaps it is all the theory, but I can’t help but look at this through an Hegelian lens — a modified Hegelian lens, perhaps. I think that the dialectic can be troublesome, and the synthesis promised in the process does not always account for every eventuality. That being said, I think that this adversarial relationship that can arise between student and teacher to be in some senses inevitable and unavoidable. As well, I don’t think that this conflict is inherently negative in any sense. I think that struggle with, for, and against a teacher can be a really positive learning experience for all involved. This doesn’t mean, however, that it is an easy learning experience to say the least.

I think that when confronted with a consciousness that, in this instance, from the students’ perspectives, holds a sort of knowledge or power over them, there is an almost immediate creation of the adversary. Whether the student sees this adversarial relationship as something they can win, something they have to endure, or something that they want to avoid entirely, there is always going to be a sense of competition or dialectical fighting. Of course, I think that this process can become strife, but I also believe, that, even in a negative instance where the relationship is strained, there is something to be learned, synthesized. It seems like the word adversary is maybe the problem that I am having here. It is a slight change in description, but, from my experience (when I have ran into this dynamic with a student), I have felt more as if we are opponents on opposite ends of a tennis court (insert adoration for David Foster Wallace here!).

I think that this small difference in wording highlights the more positive side to the relationship. When a student is challenged or frustrated and decides to try and exercise some sort of friction with the teacher, I imagine them as being, simply, an opponent engaged in a game rather than an adversary engaged in a struggle for life and death. I have had students come forward to challenge my responses, and, while it did feel adversarial, I got more of a sense of this attitude towards the relationship as an attitude of an opposing sports team, an opposing tennis player as it were. In this sense, when I chose to simply volley the ball back onto their side of the court, I realized that they were, like an opponent in a game, testing my game for weakness, for cracks, for the place that they could slip in and win. Instead of giving into a battle for the “win”, I chose to keep volleying the ball, and, eventually, settled into a practice session with the student. Instead of using this adversarial relationship to drive home a point or to put a student in their place, I like to use it as the prelude to a fun game of back-and-forth. This way, that sense of competition remains, but it loses some of it’s more negative implications, and, ultimately, it aids in the synthesis of an answer of some sort much better than just having a war of attrition with an adversarial figure.