A Teaching Handbook for Wiccans and Pagans by Thea Sabin

and can have ulterior motives at worst. It’s also good to be careful with people who are sucking up to you because you might never live up to their expectations. They need to know up front that you are human, you will make mistakes, and you don’t expect them to put you on a pedestal or pander to you.
    What’s really sad are potential students who prostrate themselves in front of you not because they’re trying to manipulate you or get something out of you, but because they think that’s what they’re supposed to do. It’s an unfortunate fact that there have been some Pagan teachers who have acted like they walk on water and like they are superior to their students and deserve accolades and adulation. This is a good opportunity to show your potential student that you are not one of those. (Because you’re not, right?)
    Compatibility
    Screening to find out if a potential student’s personality is compatible with yours and those of your other students is very important in any longer -term teaching situation. Sylva Markson explains:
    I look for basic compatibility of personality—I mean, they have to be someone we like, because ultimately a coven is in a lot of ways an adult family. We throw around the term “family of choice” a lot, but ultimately it’s really true in that these are people you’re working with on a deep level. You have to be able to let your guard down with them. You have to be able to trust them. You’re going to have a level of intimacy just by virtue of the fact that you’re dealing with your spirituality with these people. So they have to be people that you like, that you are willing to work with on that level.
    And, as Melanie Henry points out, if you are doing any sort of energy work, it really helps if the student can gel with your energy and / or that of your group:
    We’re very flexible and have very few hard and fast rules, but you have to get the energy right to work with us. That might sound like sort of a loosey-goosey boundary, but it’s not really. What I find is that people who do not hang with the energy kind of get ejected. That can be painful for everybody, unfortunately, which is not something I would desire, but it’s an interesting process.
    Brian Rowe also talked about the importance of new members being compatible with an existing group because of the impact that group members can have on each other:
    When we’re dealing with a small-group coven, each personality and each communication style has the ability to magnify other traits in people in the coven. If somebody brings something forward, it can ripple through the group.
    This is not to say that everyone has to be a perfect fit. Flexibility in dealing with others’ personalities and quirks can be a very important trait in potential students, and willingness to meet others in the group halfway can make up for some inherent differences in preferences or opinions. Sylva Markson commented:
    Open-mindedness. I’ve talked about how you have to allow each individual to be an individual, but they have to allow the other people in the group to be individuals too. They can’t come in with such firm ideas about what everybody has to believe or what everybody has to do, because if they do, they’re going to wind up having lots of conflicts with other people in the group who don’t fit in their mold.
    Again, it’s impossible to tell for certain during a screening process whether someone will be compatible with you and your group. You can try to ensure that people have the basic qualities you’d like up front, but the rest unfolds as people get to know each other.
    And you can at least rule out people who have obvious compatibility issues with your group. For example, my husband and I once interviewed a potential student who had just moved to our city. During the course of our conversation, it became obvious that she wouldn’t get along