Dear Pilgrims Friends,

I hope you’ve all had a great start into 2022: joy, health and peace of mind in the New Year ahead!

In the last Pilgrims Café, during a chat with André (Hedlund) and Jeremy (Harmer) on the nature of teaching and learning, I was reminded of something my guitar teacher often says when I’m stuck in the middle of playing a song. You know, one of those moments when the brain goes blank, you seem hopelessly lost, and you begin to feel the pangs of frustration... It happens to me (quite often, in fact), and when it does, my teacher replies to my desperate cry for help with something that is as irritating as it is eye-opening:  ‘C’est toi l’artiste’. When I first heard him say that I was upset because I didn’t really understand what he meant and I felt even more at a loss for notes, as it were. I even told him, probably in a fit of anger, that what he’d said sounded brutal, cynical, almost. Then he explained that he was just encouraging me to take risks, and try out new things, and not worry about how the music was going to turn out. This is by no means trivial advice, as it means accepting the fact that on the road to success you’ll inevitably fall flat on your face, you’ll make mistakes, you’ll feel disconcerted.

Learning a new skill implies being able to tolerate the ambiguities, putting up with the incompleteness of information, handling the terrifying maze of uncertainty, finding a way to cope with the all-pervasive sense of inadequacy that assails most of us when we know we’re underperforming. The Austrian physicist Erwin Schrodinger once said that ‘life is a battle against the laws of entropy’, that is to say, a perpetual fight against the tendency in nature for physical systems to grow more disorderly in time…I think teaching and learning might be worthy substitutes to ‘life’ in that quotation…

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As I write, at Pilgrims we’re busy setting up TD courses in Limerick this summer, and more courses in Limerick, Segovia and Canterbury, between March and May. The fact that Pilgrims has now become a de facto pan-European organization is such a source of joy… We have relocated to Ireland, but we run TD courses in Paris, Segovia, and Geneva. (All these courses are eligible for Erasmus+, in case you are wondering.)

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I want to thank you all for joining us on the Pilgrims Café:  this space is meant to be an informal hang-out for teachers and trainers to share ideas, talk shop and support each other under such duress! I’m so glad we keep seeing so many of you, we hope you find the conversations and ideas aired in the café useful. Our next café (March 5) will feature Scott Thornbury, please register here: info@pilgrimsteachertraining.eu

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That’s it for me this time. Until next time, Teach’em a lesson!

Chaz Pugliese, Director of Education and Teacher Training, Pilgrims