Encounter [Wexler]

'Encounter' in E1, A Teacher's PerpLexicon, Peter Wexler.

A teacher-student encounter. One side seeks to 'improve' the other, who doesn't mind being improved, so long as it doesn't involve being different. One side seeks to displace, the other has an inbuilt inertia. The resultant is something in between, which both sides settle for. It's difficult (as you see) to stop thinking of one side of this engagement as being somehow Nominative and the other Accusative.

But each side has come to the classroom as to a market. Both end up getting somewhat less than they'd hoped, renouncing a little more than they contemplated at the outset. In the ideal case, both parties discover in this act of renunciation which of their initial hopes were less non-negotiable than they had originally supposed; come to see this as an insight which neither could have achieved without the other; and so (overriding the adversarial terminology of 'both parties') learn to abandon their all-too-reassuring Nominativeness or Accusativeness, as the case may be.