Vicki
The pictures got your attention, didn't they? No wonder Madison Avenue employs the methods.
Of course there's the issue of whether or not they're ever able to sell a product...
chef wrote:
I apologize for having offended and made wrong assumptions, once again.
Am stepping away from the forum for a while.
No need to apologize.
Actually you've been one of many students who has seen my tear-it-down, build-it-back-up teaching approach to complex moves and applications. God knows I have enough problems trying to figure out if I'm doing things "right" myself without some method. Conveying that information to someone new and having them "get" it makes sound process even more important. And now that you are more and more becoming a teacher...
Picture "H" doing Seisan kata, or practicing applications in Seisan bunkai. You watch him go through from beginning to end, having difficulty at many points. Well if twelve mistakes are made but you can point to just 2 principles that caused those twelve mistakes, how powerful is that process? In the beginning you need to micromanage their learning and show them the connections. But eventually it takes just a handful of words to communicate a truckload of problems.
Sometimes students don't want that concept/principles approach. "Just tell me what I'm doing wrong!" I deal with that sometimes at work with programmers who want me just to tell them what to do rather than first explain the problem. And then farther down the road they make assumptions, and they goof. They goof because they don't understand the problem, or why we are approaching something a certain way. But a little more work on the front end can save lots of work on the back end.
If you start your teaching/learning right, you teach the student to teach themselves. Some teachers don't want that; they create dependencies. There is the illusion of getting a lot of "stuff" at first when they get lots and lots of applications to go play with. But a process which starts slower at first can sometimes lead to greater efficiencies and fewer dependencies down the road.
Give a Man a Fish, Feed Him For a Day. Teach a Man to Fish, Feed Him For a Lifetime.
-
Lau Tzu
More importantly with martial arts... You can NEVER perfectly create "the problem" in the cooperative setting of a dojo or training field. Chaos (nonlinear math) teaches us that much of life consists of unique situations that can never be perfectly reproduced. You do your best. But ultimately you want the practitioner to be able to "think on their feet" so to speak, so they have both the confidence and the tools to solve the brand new problem of a very specific real-life encounter all by themselves. IMO, the student who understands principles (understand at the 10,000 repetition level) is better equipped to go freeform in this manner.
Application does need to inform basics. That's the reason for the "circular" approach to training in Uechi's style. But ultimately you want to see less and less of the "deer in the headlamps" as you present more and more new problems to the student. When they start to break out of the mold, then you know your job is done.
- Bill
(with apologies to Rory)
