Teaching at Many Levels
I happen to be in Paris attending the UNESCO General Conference which takes place every other year. At this conference national delegations from UNESCO's 180-member states deliberate on the draft programme and budget for the next biennium (in this case, 1994-95). The opportunity is also taken for UNESCO staff away from Headquarters to come to Paris for a few weeks to touch base with our 'fellow' colleagues and at the same time interact with the national delegations.
Since leaving the South and North American Continental Conference in Santa Fe, which incidentally was a wonderful experience, I have been quite active. In August at my wife's family reunion on Long Island, New York I was asked by the organizers to give a short talk on RC. I had been speaking to the main organizer of the family reunion privately about RC a few months before that. So I addressed the sixty or so of the Jackson family ranging in ages from six to eighty-eight. The response was quite favorable, but I knew I had conveyed the message when next day eight-year-old Bernadette said, 'I'm as smart as Uncle Winthrop.' Initially I couldn't figure out what she was talking about. Then she said, 'You said so last night.' Of course she was alluding to when I told them that young people are just as intelligent as us adults, all we have over them is more information and experience so we must trust and respect their thinking.
I'm excited that I've started teaching my first fundamentals class. I have fifteen students in the class, four of whom are new. An unusual, if not unique, feature is that five of my brothers and sisters (three brothers and two sisters) are in it. All of them have done at least one previous cycle. The feedback I get is that the class is fun.
Waveney Richards did a great job teaching me. When she did counseling demonstrations I sometimes used to think that she was a magician. The client would begin with some apparently innocuous comment and very rapidly she would get to the core of the early hurt and lots of discharge. When last Tuesday I did a similar thing in the class demonstration I knew for sure that Waveney had done a good job with me.
While I'm in Paris for two weeks my brother Louis is leading the class. He has done five fundamentals cycles and has done a great deal of reading of the various books. He's an excellent assistant.
Winthrop Wiltshire
Diamond Vale, Trinidad and Tobago