Imagine you’ve just spent several years teaching a group of students your life’s work. It’s your last day. You’re halfway out the door and one asks: “Could you just sum up everything you said before you go? “Wonderful,” you say, and begin.

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Imagine you’ve just spent several years teaching a group of students your life’s work. It’s your last day. You’re halfway out the door and one asks: “Could you just sum up everything you said before you go? “Wonderful,” you say, and begin. 

So, the advice on how to be clear comes from a Buddhist teacher from a thousand or so years ago and I am not very well versed in the historical reality of what happened when. But I recommend you go and read about it somewhere else if you would like to know. As I understand it there was a very well-respected, well-regarded teacher called Atisha who lived in India and was teaching in a monastery there and some people in Tibet were very keen for him to come and make the huge, huge journey across the mountains to come and teach there. And with great difficulty it was arranged and he traveled there.

Apparently this advice is from his final day. And he’s been in Tibet and he’s been teaching for two years and he’s about to leave and his students who’ve been following him and listening to him ask him for one final teaching. And in the text that I read his response is ‘How wonderful!’ And it makes me laugh to think of how you could read that. Either it’s genuinely a teacher feeling glad that after two years of teaching his students are still engaged and hungry and taking seriously the fact that he’s not going to be there anymore. This is their chance. This is their last chance. SO when they come and say please give us a final teaching he’s glad that they still have the appetite. And also perhaps that he just really loves teaching. So when someone asks him to teach his response will always be ‘oh brilliant - how wonderful’. And then there’s a bit of me - and I’m sure this isn’t appropriate - who can’t help but think of the unreasonableness of the request. And how he might have hoped they’d asked sooner. If you’re a normal teacher and you were teaching GCSE Physics and someone came up to you on the last day and said ‘can you teach us everything that we were meant to learn in the last two years because we have our exams tomorrow?’ you might have to take a deep breath and not say

Well you should have thought about that sooner, but say ‘how wonderful - of course I can teach you everything in the few minutes I have before the end of the last day.

And this sort of double version, these two possibilities, it’s not like it matters which is true. I don’t hold them in mind because I’m debating which is true, but rather when I think of these possibilities - the delighted teacher who is genuinely happy that his students are asking for help or the slightly exasperated teacher who is trying to respond in a positive way to a slightly unreasonable request that might signal his students haven’t been paying enough attention so far, when I think of these two possibilities it lets me imagine how the teaching might have been given. This isn’t a casual Tuesday lunchtime teaching in a series of Tuesday afternoons that stretch out forever where if we don’t cover something today, we’ll cover it tomorrow. I’m just going to chat on about this thing and see how it goes.

This is last-chance teaching.

So imagine you’re that teacher and you’ve spent several years teaching a group of students your life’s work. And you’ve summed up your life’s work into just two years. And it’s your last day and you’re halfway out the door. And one asks ‘could you just sum up everything you’ve said before you go? Could you sum up these two years in two minutes?’ 

And you’re not sat in your chair, people aren’t sat around and waiting, you don’t have your things you normally need for teaching around you.

Just...right - top of my head - what are the things that matter most?

And you might deliver it with that kind of forcefulness of:

‘Listen gang .You need to hear this now. And I’m going to say it to you as plainly as possible. With no embellishments. No flourish. No fluff. In the hope that if I say it very, very clearly you might remember it between you and it might go in and it might stay in and it might help. Because I’m going now and you can’t rely on me to answer your questions.'