Good Cop - Bad Cop

At the moment it feels a little as though the profs are playing a little game with us. The 'push them harder, push them harder' game. On the other hand it's dead on half-way through the term, so perhaps we have lost our initial energy and enthusiasm and are being a bit crap and therefore need a shove up the communal arse.
I strongly suspect, though am not completely sure that there is a strategy to the arc of the teachers’ response to our work. Sometimes last year I felt we got an overly good reaction for the Autocours at the end of a section of work because we were all getting depressed and weary and ditto often the response seems to be negative in order to push us to find better work when they feel we are capable of it. This week we are definitely being pushed, I think because we’re about to end a section of work and they want us to really find it.
I have a lot of feelings about this system of teaching. As a teacher myself I have always tried to teach from the good, hopefully allowing confidence to build and the bad to drop away. I think they would say that they don’t talk about good and bad, but when things are truthful and just and when they aren’t. That they don’t want us to fulfil their desires, just to be good - i.e. truthful and entertaining. Certainly we can all see when a group does get it ‘right’ and it works.
I had an interesting conversation with a friend who studied here 30 years ago when Lecoq was still alive and Gaulier still taught there. She had just had an ex-Lecoq teacher staying with her and he’d been telling her about his training to be a teacher. There is a third year for people to train to be teachers, though there haven’t been any in my time here. He was one of the last to be trained by Lecoq himself, he said he must have known he was dying because that year five people were training instead of one or two. Each week someone would be hauled over the coals and humiliated in front of the others. Perhaps unsurprising given the overall teaching methods. And now I think the teachers are much ‘nicer’ to us than Lecoq was. He was, without any doubt, a genius. The pedagogie is extraordinary and must have come from an amazing mind. But also, from what people have said, he was a real manipulator who played people against one another to stay in a position of undisputed fear and power. He taught something about a third eye, or eye contact where you never actually looked at the students in the eye. Or something like that. Weird and scary.
If it's a game of Good Cop - Bad Cop, Paola is definitely the Bad Cop. She keeps telling us that its the second year and that now she's going to really push and provoke us, but in that her behaviour is not noticeably different to last year. Perhaps she is a little more personal and has made more people cry. The thing is, when she says things that make people cry, they tend to be true. I think that there’s a more effective way of giving people information that they’ll be able to take on board. When you get scared and nervous it becomes much more difficult to improvise - you close up. She says that acting is tough and you need to be tough. She certainly is.
Joss then is the Good Cop, though even he is pushing us a bit more this week. And Christophe is the BFG somehow accidentally teaching at Lecoq with the most extraordinary selection of 80’s tracksuits. Sitting next to each other watching Autocours Christophe and Joss seem to match, both dishevelled, hair pointing in all directions, gently shaking their heads at disaster after disaster while Paola rants and rages.