Teaching Martial Arts - Part 1

I have been reading The Guru's Handbook blog for a few weeks now. For any aspiring teacher, I highly recommend it. For anybody else, I STILL highly recommend it. It's maintained by a person going under the pseudonym of Asher Bey, and it has some great advice on it.

I myself have been writing a book on teaching martial arts, a project I bagan some 17 years ago when I had a teacher who was great at teaching some things, and would lie about things he didn't know. I didn't realize I was writing a book at that time, I just wanted an accurate notebook of what he said in case I suspected something was fishy. As time went on, this note taking became a habit, and I would train at other schools and do the same thing; Write down whatever the teacher said and taught that night. After almost two decades of this I have, at last count, 112 filled notebooks, tablets and pads of notes on various martial styles, collected from thousands of classes. This is AFTER I have condensed quite a few from one style into three notebooks, and converted those into digital files.

Somewhere, there is a rain forest I have significantly contributed to the demise of.

Reading Asher's latest post made me want to tell about my own experiences with teaching, and some of the discoveries I have made along the way. I took some time before I started writing this entry to try to count how many teachers I have had in my life. Since I was thinking about martial arts at the time, I simply started with, and limited myself to, that field. But as I listed who taught what to me it soon bled over into other areas, because there are so many things I discovered about myself and martial arts from people that had nothing to do with either. I won't bore you with the process, but suffice it to say this: I concluded that the best starting point was a question:

How do we learn?

Teaching is one half of the equation, and I will address it in a later post. But the learning process is no less important, and it’s inseparably connected to the teaching process. You may have these confused, I have discovered that the general consensus is that if a teacher teaches, learning takes place. One would think that such a simplistic statement, coupled with the presented linear style of thought, is factual. However, I have found a distinctive symbiotic relationship here: Teaching does not exist unless someone is actually comprehending your words. Learning does not exist unless you are receptive to the instruction. From the teacher’s prospective, a lot of teaching is occurring, but I can put myself into the student’s shoes and see that very little LEARNING is taking place. Think of a garden hose: How much water can you drink out of one, and are you even thirsty at all? Motivation for learning is like that. If you don’t want something more, Socrates himself couldn’t teach you. Just because something will benefit you, enrich your life or put you ahead of the heard doesn’t mean that you are going to embrace it to the best of your abilities. Everybody in the world suffers from this at some point or another. We know everyday things in life are dangerous, and we know what safety is, yet we keep slipping on banana peels and falling into manholes with no danger of learning how to avoid that in the future.

Our basic introduction to education isn’t really the place to start, the public school system is more of a cattle herding process than any real institution of learning. Not that is the teacher’s fault, they are just as trapped by it as the kids. The system is “Throw knowledge out in the form of fact & logic until something sticks.” And if it doesn’t tough shit. Some get out of it & into college with a grasp of education & it’s value. Others just use college as an excuse to extend their vacation from real life on mommy & daddy’s dime.

I am by no stretch of the imagination an expert to speak of this subject, and I will admit to you from the outset that I can only give you one perspective: My own experiences. I am still a student in understanding the teacher – student process and relationship.

I myself never liked school until I was halfway through 10th grade, and I avoided classes the way Keanu Reeves avoided acting. Now, I could say this was due to any number of reasons unrelated to motivation: My hormones were in full bloom & full control of everything else, so I skipped class to get laid. Which frequently happened. I mean, World History or pussy?

C’mon, tell me YOU wouldn’t make the same choice!

I could site martial arts training over education, which is absolutely true. I quit high school, ran away from the children’s home I was in at the time and just trained Kung Fu for years.

I could say it was because I have Dyslexia. Or Hypoglycemia. I do, you know. Conquering THAT alone is its own story.

I could say that I had horrible emotional scarring from being tortured in New Bethany Boy’s Home, and I couldn’t concentrate on anything for more than three or four minutes, let alone entire class periods. True, also.

No parents to enforce academic habits in me, and therefore no punishment/reward system to instill some sort of values in my impressionable head. We all know that by now.

But none of those reasons are the WHOLE truth, in fact I used them as excuses for myself in the past whenever someone would say “Bobbe would succeed in this class if he would just apply himself!” And if I am to admit right here and now what really is at the heart of my behavior and attitude towards education when I was a teenager, it’s this: I was lazy. I just didn’t care. In fact, I also remember not wanting to care. Education could rot as long as I was knee-deep in ass, comics and nunchucks. I could read and add 2 + 2, that’s more than enough to survive by working at burger world. But what this STEMMED from was a lack of perspective: Having never seen the end of the tunnel (knowledge, and it’s use) I had no motivation to attempt the journey to it. I was comfortable where I was, and there was no change in sight for me. I was stubborn, I knew it, and smirked at everyone who pointed it out. I mean, I was getting by, right? So much for the magic bullet theory...

So what finally did it? Maturity? Did I grow up? Maybe to some degree, but that wasn’t the cataclysm. People like the “Me” of 20 years ago need a spark to set them off, something to light a fire under their asses. It normally happens in a way that is more gradual in most people, but I can tell you the exact moment my eyes opened to something higher, and I would almost call it enlightenment. I can say this because I DISTINCTLY remember the way I felt when it happened.

I was promoted to instructor in an esoteric form of Kung Fu.

This was my first instructor-level rank.

It was completely out of the blue, and unexpected since I was well below the minimum age for the rank at the time. But I had been an assistant instructor at the school for a few years at the time, and I guess the teacher felt I had what it took. But whatever the reason, I went home that night with a black belt.

I went back to my cheesebox-sized apartment that night and just stared at the certificate. And I FELT DIFFERENT. Oh no, I don’t mean that I suddenly knew everything wise and just that some self-inflated “Master” knows, or that I achieved the answers to the universe. But what had happened was I had a sense of achievement. I had done it.

All the painful dings and bangs my body had endured, all the sweat and hard work, all the bickering and political bullshit I had witnessed, all the people who were in my beginner class & had dropped out had come to fruition: I had weathered the storm, passed the trials, crossed the finish line, RAN THE RACE. My motivation for learning came from a sense of accomplishment:
I did that. Me. Alone. I came this far…

*Evil Whisper* …and I want some more.

Man, I was slapped silly by the hand of Oh My God. How far could I go with this? What else was possible? What else have I missed because of my ego? I thought of all these things over the next few weeks, it was like a door was opening up. Every day, sometimes every hour would bring some thought or idea that I had missed all this time when it had been in front of me for years. And my glaring lack of a basic education was becoming more and more evident every time I applied for a job. So I decided that the first thing I would need was a diploma…Because that’s what everybody was asking for on job applications. So, first things first…

I went back to school & eventually earned my diploma. Since I was WAY past the age where I could enroll in High School, I had to go to night school to earn credits, so I could work during the day. I did this for a year and managed to graduate within a much shorter time than usual. Because I had decided to bust my ass, and when I wasn’t at work I was buried under a pile of books, I graduated in the top 3% of my class. Further proof that hard work pays off big.

Next, college: I first attended classes at the University of South Carolina, but my need to support myself overcame the desire to be a full time student, so I ended up just auditing the classes I liked, and to seven hells with the Home Economics course. They really didn’t offer anything for people in my position, anyway. I never earned a degree, but I stayed until I gained a level of competence in what I wanted: Graphic Design. Unfortunately, I wanted Archeology first, and didn’t change courses until two years later. But by this time, I had done it: I was motivated. I wanted to learn. I wanted to squeeze everything I could out of anybody who had knowledge. I had changed my study habits, and there wasn't a time that I could recall leaving the apartment without a bookbag full of books. And thus, the evolution began...

So here we are almost 20 years later: I can speak and read four languages fluently, one badly, and one horribly. I can quote Marcus Aurelius, Aristotle, Aristophanes and Plato. I have been to several foreign countries, for months on end. I can navigate my way from Malaysia to Bali without getting shot. I know every local custom of the Sunda race. I can cook a gourmet meal, pick a lock, and find the Southern Cross on a clear night in Bandung. I am an internationally ranked chess player. I can build a computer from the ground up, plan and establish a computer network, and troubleshoot most major Windows programs. I can hack a Cisco Pix Firewall, no mean feat unto itself. I know Photoshop, Freehand, Illustrator and Dreamweaver fluently. I can type 85 wpm.

And I have some measure of respect in the Martial Arts world. (I have some measure of disdain as well, so maybe that isn’t a good example).

I said all that to show the diversity my motivation took…As soon as I could accommodate it, I took on another area of study that I was even mildly interested in. Cooking, drawing, computers, you name it. My bookshelf is crammed with esoteric tomes from every corner of the world, and my library in the guest bedroom is piled to the ceiling with volumes that are entirely heretical, hermeneutical, philosophical and pharmaceutical. My martial arts library alone is worth thousands on face value, thousands more if the antique and rarity value were called in. And because growth does not tolerate mediocrity, I just dove in and attacked whatever I was studying until I was GOOD at it.

Not “Okay”.

GOOD.

In some things, I aspire to be great.

My habit now is to commit fully, heart and soul, to whatever endeavor I decide to go for, and surround myself with others who also excel at what I am doing. I make it a habit to only train with the best, this way I get it straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. I firmly believe that we emulate the people we surround ourselves with, and I choose who I give my time to VERY carefully. I am at this moment involved in both writing and violin lessons, and Dagon knows where THAT’S going to lead. But my point here is that my earlier experience with achievement taught me two vital points that I had never realized before:

1: I actually COULD learn. This is important because I was living under the impression that higher knowledge was out of the picture for me, and I would go to my grave flipping burgers. I may still do that, but it won’t be because I can’t do anything else.

2: Every experience in life carries its own lesson, if you are receptive to it.
This last is true on a few different levels, but the most important is this: You have to WANT it. And this is probably the biggest obstacle teachers of any sort are faced with: Is the student motivated to learn, and is providing that motivation the teacher’s responsibility?

This concludes my first post on the teaching. I will continue in a couple of days with the conclusion, focusing on the teacher.