Hello Everyone,
Recently my school has undergone a change in staff. That coupled with a notable need to improve the basics for a lot of the under belts has caused a shift in dojo dynamic. There is a large focus on the basics, which is not a bad thing, but how does one differentiate between instruction that is basic and instruction that is shallow?
Because of this change in staff, we have a wonderful new full time head instructor that's running the under belt program on top of his former part time work with the Muay Thai and BJJ classes, and because he is only one man, there is a couple other part time instructors that tend to work on a rotation for the actual teaching of the traditional kung fu classes. Each of these people have different things to offer and in the world of martial arts some of them are quite young to be running classes full of students of such varying age and ability. That said most of them are fantastic in their own ways and I very much enjoy training with each of them for different reasons. I also appreciate that they are respectful of my background and experience, and so they treat me more like a colleague than a student of the school.
We do have one instructor who seems to be trying, but has a bit of an aggression and ego problem and tends to teach varying lessons but lessons that are very shallow. This person also has a problem working with new and young students (aggression is too high), and also seems to have a problem when people question him in class. Now what I mean by, his lessons are shallow, is that with some of the other instructors, we may spend a night working on a low belt, basic self defense technique. We'll dissect it, and get very technical with it, breaking it into pieces and changing different variables so that we understand how to utilize it with different sources of attack, or if the attacker is actually 2 or 3 people. Or we'll spend a class going through the bunkai (core meaning and application) of a form so we truly understand the form's designed purpose. This instructor with the ego problem, knows the forms and defenses of our curriculum but what I think the issue is, is that he hasn't spent enough time dissecting the bunkai of all of our curriculum so when we have a class with this person, the classes revolve around lessons he slaps together from things he's read, or pulls from YouTube. Now we all learn a lot reading and watching videos of others, so why is this practice bad? Answer, it's not, if you take what you learned from these outside sources, and incorporate it into what the the people that train are paying to learn. Unfortunately there is no incorporation here so the classes seem to hold the interest of the very low level beginners and seem to annoy everyone above the citrus colored belts.
The way I deal with days like this (this happened today), is to try and take what is being taught, and apply to my studies myself. I know what my goals are and as an advanced student in my school and a person with previous experience in the martial arts, I can provide my own incite to these cases. Toward the end of my time at my old school I had to do this often enough because the quality of instruction had deteriorated due to the school sort of selling out. I've also gone to a few seminars that were on the shallow end of the pool over the years. As long as you can manipulate what you are taught into something usable, it's not a waste of your time. This practice not only helps get value out of these shallow lesson days, but also forces you to really think. This will make you a better martial artist then you ever realized possible.
Now I'm sure some of you are asking how this is done. I'll provide an example from a couple months ago, where the instructor in question was running a class and was teaching what was obviously a point sparring technique, but was telling us that it was a self defense technique. This movement involved sliding out while blocking a round kick and then lunging in with a 2 handed strike as someone would joust in a point sparring tournament striking the stomach and face at the same time. This technique lacks any kind of power and is just meant to simply double your striking surface area to increase the chances that you will land a strike on an open area so the ref gives you a point. If one were to attempt to leverage this technique on the street, they would probably get themselves killed as it ties up both your hands and has no power to cause any real damage. A good friend of mine was in this class and asked for the street applicability of the technique and due to this instructor's ego problem, she was shut down.
I spent a good amount of time that evening, after this lesson, digesting the whole thing and trying to piece together what was useful. What I came up with caused me to run the movements again some more in my basement before I turned in for the night. The sliding out motion while blocking was a good way to space out yourself away from an attacker. Due to the fact that we were using a springing motion to slide in and out, if you would use this as an evasion tactic, you would be able to, rapidly, put a good gap of space between you and your assailant granting you a momentary reprieve from the attack to think. I first altered the mentality on the attack that the attacker would be throwing two kicks instead of one so as you slide back once, you block and then as the second kick comes in I altered the jousting motion from an offensive to a defensive maneuver leveraging a universal (scissor) block with my arms and then executing what is basically the "swinging pendulum" kenpo defense technique.
Taking what you are taught in a shallow class, and applying it to what you are really learning isn't an easy thing to do. It can require you to think very hard about what you're trying to accomplish and cause a lot of questions. Leveraging your fellow students, other teachers, and other resources on and offline (I love karateforums.com) is a great way to get some of those questions answered. This can also cause you to realize a lot of different things you might not have thought of on your own, and also will cause you to really improve as a martial artist yourself. After all deep thought and experimenting is where the martial arts came from in the first place so don't let these scenarios frustrate you. Also try and remember that not everyone's teaching style will work for every student. A good teacher will adapt to the student's needs, but not everyone who's a good martial artist is a good teacher and not all people with black belts are good martial artists. Find those who will work with you humbly, without arrogance, and find people to work with that have goals that mirror yours. Remember "absorb what is useful, discard what is not, add what is uniquely your own.(Bruce Lee)".
Be well and train on.
