Teaching and Three of Milton Mayeroff

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Teaching and Three of Milton Mayeroff’s Major Ingredients of Caring Milton Mayeroff’s main idea about caring is about helping the other grow. When one is helping someone grow, it is actually a process, a way of relating to someone that involves development. In section two of his book, “On Caring”, Meyeroff explains eight major ingredients of caring; Knowing, Alternation, Rhythms, Patience, Honesty, Trust, Humility and Courage. Three of the eight ingredients are analyzed below; Knowing, Patience and Trust, which he uses when caring for his students. Knowing. People normally think that they do not need any knowledge to care for someone and that good intentions are enough. But, from Mayeroff’s point of view, in order to care for a person one must be able to understand another’s needs and must be able to respond to a person properly. Good intentions alone do not guarantee this. According to Mayeroff, to care for another person, one must know who that person is and what his/her powers and limitations are, what he/she really needs in order to grow. Moreover, in order to respond to a person’s needs, one also must know his/her powers and limitations as well. Mayeroff explains three different kinds of knowledge involved in caring. The first is that people know some things explicitly and some things implicitly. To know something explicitly means to be able to tell what one knows so that one can put it into words and explain it to others. To know something implicitly means one has knowledge about something or someone but cannot verbalize it. The second kind of knowing has to do with the difference between just knowing about something and knowing how to do it practically. Third, there is a difference between directly and indirectly knowing something. Knowing directly in caring relationships means one experiences the other directly but in a way that one is aware of the

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