On the difference between teaching a student and casting magic

I've noted that a lot of the time, good leadership in the Craft community has to do with inspiration, rather than control. That sounds kind of harsh, so let me phrase it another way; a good teacher, I think, is concerned with the process of learning (student will understand concept Y) vs. the specific outcome (i.e. the student now will have Opinion X).

I was liking that; because I find it works well for me, both as student and as teacher.

Then I stated thinking about the idea of magic. When I do magic, I am concerned about a specific outcome. To use an example, let's say think that person X is an unscrupulous bugger. So I cast a spell intending that the result should be that "X should be perceived as he/she truly is". Do I care how that comes about? No, not in terms of casting the spell. I can offhand imagine quite a few ways that this might happen, but for purposes in casting of the spell, none of that matters. What matters is my focusing on the results.

So anyway, the contrast between the two modes was kind of rolling around in my head - that I can have an approach that is either outcome-oriented, or process-oriented, but not really both.

Then I thought about molecules and atoms (I just finished Chemistry, and am revieiwing biochemistry for my upcoming biology class) and I started thinking about that thing of you can know the position of an electron, or you can know the speed of it, but not both. In the same way you can deal with energy as a wave, or as a particle, but it's really hard to do both.

So that made me think maybe they are sort of the same thing - and that magic and Craft and teaching and learning are sort of analgous to particle theory on a macro level.

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