As a teacher, I would treat each student differently, not equally.
The only treatment I want to give to all students equally is to respond to them in their difference and therefore have my own way of speaking and acting to one in this way and another differently.
If I prefer one student to another, I have my reasons. But it is completely nonsensical to assume that I make the preference of one the rule, because reality does not allow such a thing.
One of the students can always appear to be in need of something, but he can also be needless and powerful; a student is not the same person every day (hour, minute). In any case, he is not someone who sat in class yesterday, but already someone else, just like me and everyone else in the room.
The mind I call "problem lover" here thinks it's a problem that I treat all students differently. He says it creates trouble. Oh really?
But how can I refrain from treating the pupils differently, how can it be done the other way round, how does it actually work to "treat everyone the same"?
Is it not so that the only way to treat everyone equally is to give them a different form of treatment?
And how is it supposed to be possible at all, if I put myself in this consideration, that I should always be the same person I was yesterday? How is it possible that I am not only always the same as I was yesterday, but also tomorrow?
That's complete nonsense, because it doesn't work.
But the problem-loving mind, it thinks up a task that is absolutely impossible to solve.
It creates a dilemma and henceforth everyone else is supposed to love this very problem.
Treat everyone equally while at the same time treating everyone differently is already something that happens in every room, there is no dilemma at all. It is the rule, not the exception.
Where the exception becomes the rule, it takes hold of all problem-loving minds. Like startled chickens that are otherwise quite content to sit on the roost, but now believe the fox is their whole world.
Now it only remains to say further that every problem-loving mind that seeks to solve the dilemma must walk this path of folly to the very end.
Who tries to persuade him to shorten the path will despair.
To let the fool attain to wisdom would be foolishness on my part, and if I cannot desist from not letting the problem-loving minds go their way, I am a fool myself. I may feel that the whole world is a fox.
Picture source:
Von Vectorization of this classic image of Liáng Kǎi was performed by Daniël de Kok - Originally from Wikipedia (Huineng page)., Gemeinfrei, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8526338
cool.