My old sempai used to (sort of) quote Musashi by saying "The martial arts walk is the everyday walk." By that he meant that you should be yourself; that you should not have to adapt too much to effectively move if a dangerous situation should arise. In his way of thinking, one should practice until one "owns" the kata; after which your ordinary movement and that of any given technique should become one and the same. (I think the reverse is more true, but that is a topic for another post.)
I never said anything to contradict him; but the truth is, I never agreed with him. While the martial arts walk may ideally be the everyday walk, most people's everyday walks do not stack up in any way.
I once took a class (okay, it was in the theatre department) in which we had to walk around campus and (from a subtle distance) follow three different people around until we could more or less imitate their gait. Then we had to present what we had found about the way different people walked. I really liked this little exercise (which is more than I could say about the program as a whole) because it gave me a sense of how differently people handled moving through space. Age, weight, physical condition, footwear, cultural expectations - all of these factors influence how people move. And most people are not really aware of just how individually they walk. While my teacher was expecting us to pick up some idea of character development for some future acting role, I found the exercise fascinating simply for its own sake.
All of this uniqueness is wonderful, but it's not always effective. To note a very obvious example, walking while looking at your smartphone is not very smart. A number of people have done so with injurious (or even, occasionally, fatal) results. Then there is the sense that some people have of putting as little effort into moving about as possible. As one of my teachers once said, "If you are alive, then you should be lively." The natural counter to this argument is that we are all too tired to feel lively, but that's not really true. Putting energy and good alignment into your "everyday walk" is energizing. When I am very tired (usually around every Thursday morning), I take special care to put energy into my everyday movement. I save the look of exhaustion for when I get home, if then.
So I tell my budo students that they have to work on their footwork not just for their kata and waza when they are in the dojo; they have to work on it on the outside as well. Nothing drives me and my colleagues quite so crazy as watching a student do reasonably good footwork while performing a kata or technique, then plodding back to the line and slumping into a poor resemblance of seiza when they are finished. Outside of the idea that it is good to be lively even when he is not at okeiko, I have found that if a student only corrects his footwork during a given technique or kata, the moment a new set of techniques is introduced, the student has to learn his "kata walk" all over again. If an instructor introduces some hypothetical variation even to a familiar technique, the student whose martial arts walk does not coincide with her everyday walk will have trouble understanding it. Without the proper foundation of good footwork the variation in technique will feel alien to her.
Every teacher involved in movement training, whether dance or budo, has emphasized footwork. As I started to get better at these practices I began to notice that I could judge someone's experience and skill simply by how they walked. Any competent teacher can tell you that as the feet are set, so is the koshi (the area of the lower abdomen, hips and lower back). And as the koshi is set, so is whatever technique, whether in budo, in dance or in walking down a subway platform or crossing a street.
A number of my colleagues have noted that in practicing koryu budo, you adapt yourself to the art, rather than the art to yourself. In that case, if the martial arts walk is truly the everyday walk, then we must adapt our everyday walk to bring it in line with our practice, not the other way around.
Thursday, April 27, 2017
Wednesday, April 5, 2017
On not making students into beggars
A colleague of mine recently passed along some advice his teacher gave him many years ago: "Don't make people into beggars." He then went on to explain (because I truly did not understand what this meant) that if a student asks you for something (in the same way a beggar will ask for money), you should not necessarily give it to her. (In fact, it might be better for both of you, if you don't give her anything she asks for at all!) He went on to say that he thought I had done just that in the past, but it might be better if I didn't do it in the future.
I had to think about this for awhile before I began to understand it; and now that I do understand the idea somewhat, I would have to say that I agree with him. I have made beggars out of some people by giving them what they asked for. And I have decided, even though it's a hard habit to break, to stop.
I don't think I always had this problem. It seems to me that, long ago, before I began teaching on my own, I was pretty hard-assed. If someone asked me a question that I figured he knew the answer to, I refused to answer him again. Or I would answer his question with another one. A previous post of mine paraphrased a saying of Confucius: that the teacher gives a student "one corner" and the student must come up with the "other three." In other words, the teacher's job is not to spoon-feed knowledge to a student, it's to point him in the right direction and then expect him to deepen his understanding himself.
I always thought this was a good idea (thanks, Confucius). After all, a student will own her understanding of an aspect of budo training, and in fact value it more, if she has to arrive at that insight herself. To use a well-worn example, a Zen teacher gives a student a koan and the student has to come up with the answer himself, even if it takes years to attain. Budo is a somewhat more practical (and not as deep) type of training, but the point still holds.
However, somewhere along the way, I lost this aspect of my teaching. When a student asked for more training time, about a year ago, I demurred, saying he should practice more on his own. I was already at capacity, time-wise, and, while more training is generally good, quality counts more than quantity. Nevertheless, like the person you see on the subway day after day (and even year after year), asking for money, this student would not give up. So, eventually, I gave in, and added another day of okeiko.
At first, there were several people attending the extra day, and, though I was exhausted by the end of each week, teaching is energizing, especially when the response is enthusiastic. Was I a zombie at the end of the week? Yes. Yes I was. Multiple days of five hours of sleep or less took its toll on other parts of my life, too. Nevertheless, I rationalized it that while I was young enough, and healthy enough, I should practice as much as I could.
Three days in a row of teaching for multiple hours at a time seemed to be great for some of my students. However, I soon noticed that I was the ONLY one coming to okeiko three days a week! Everyone else came one day, or two days at the most. The person who begged for the extra day managed to come three times in a week a couple of times, and he was a wreck by day 3. And he lived closer, and got more sleep generally, than I did.
Teaching is exhausting. When I as an adjunct professor, I made sure to get more sleep the nights before I taught class. It wasn't that the students were smarter than me - they were faster. I needed more energy to keep up with them than they needed to outdo me (and we're talking English Composition here). Even though I was standing in front of a blackboard or sitting in an office chair, I sweated through my underwear every single class. I bristle every time I hear some bureaucrat opine that teachers are lazy people who only work nine months out of the year but get paid for 12. In the first place, teachers do work all year round. In the second place, the good ones work harder than almost anyone else.
Nevertheless, I can say that the collapse was slow. Sort of like how pain drops a veil over you and you don't even realize your diminishing capacity until it becomes really obvious to you and everyone else. I was functioning, but barely. I was forgetting things. Not the important stuff of everyday life, but the things that enrich that life. I have several hobbies (believe it or not) that involve collecting materials. I would buy materials while on vacation, for example, then forget entirely where I put them. Not that I had time to make use of them anyway. Other things that I enjoyed simply went away altogether (like regularly writing this blog). My dojo schedule didn't just take over my life, it became my life.
And my students, for whom I was sacrificing all of that time? Several of them dropped out, as people do from time to time. Relocation, work schedules, etc. etc. Normal things. The one who begged for the extra time is still around, but I think he learned just as well whether he spent extra time with me as not. In fact, I have come back to subscribing to old Confucius - he's better off searching out those other three corners on his own. My providing the other corners did not make him a better budoka. Instead, it made him more dependent on me for things he should have been figuring out on his own.
Just like the collapse, recovery has also been slow. I have kept three days of practice, but one of them is short, and for me alone. Soon there will be a "course correction" so that I will be teaching closer to home, the purpose being that I can indulge in the idea of more sleep just like my students do. I reorganized my hobby materials so I can actually find things when I want them (a never-ending process, but at least now I know where stuff is). Just in time for gardening season. Just in time for maybe sitting outdoors on a nice evening with a beer and just looking at the plants growing. It's a start.
I had to think about this for awhile before I began to understand it; and now that I do understand the idea somewhat, I would have to say that I agree with him. I have made beggars out of some people by giving them what they asked for. And I have decided, even though it's a hard habit to break, to stop.
I don't think I always had this problem. It seems to me that, long ago, before I began teaching on my own, I was pretty hard-assed. If someone asked me a question that I figured he knew the answer to, I refused to answer him again. Or I would answer his question with another one. A previous post of mine paraphrased a saying of Confucius: that the teacher gives a student "one corner" and the student must come up with the "other three." In other words, the teacher's job is not to spoon-feed knowledge to a student, it's to point him in the right direction and then expect him to deepen his understanding himself.
I always thought this was a good idea (thanks, Confucius). After all, a student will own her understanding of an aspect of budo training, and in fact value it more, if she has to arrive at that insight herself. To use a well-worn example, a Zen teacher gives a student a koan and the student has to come up with the answer himself, even if it takes years to attain. Budo is a somewhat more practical (and not as deep) type of training, but the point still holds.
However, somewhere along the way, I lost this aspect of my teaching. When a student asked for more training time, about a year ago, I demurred, saying he should practice more on his own. I was already at capacity, time-wise, and, while more training is generally good, quality counts more than quantity. Nevertheless, like the person you see on the subway day after day (and even year after year), asking for money, this student would not give up. So, eventually, I gave in, and added another day of okeiko.
At first, there were several people attending the extra day, and, though I was exhausted by the end of each week, teaching is energizing, especially when the response is enthusiastic. Was I a zombie at the end of the week? Yes. Yes I was. Multiple days of five hours of sleep or less took its toll on other parts of my life, too. Nevertheless, I rationalized it that while I was young enough, and healthy enough, I should practice as much as I could.
Three days in a row of teaching for multiple hours at a time seemed to be great for some of my students. However, I soon noticed that I was the ONLY one coming to okeiko three days a week! Everyone else came one day, or two days at the most. The person who begged for the extra day managed to come three times in a week a couple of times, and he was a wreck by day 3. And he lived closer, and got more sleep generally, than I did.
Teaching is exhausting. When I as an adjunct professor, I made sure to get more sleep the nights before I taught class. It wasn't that the students were smarter than me - they were faster. I needed more energy to keep up with them than they needed to outdo me (and we're talking English Composition here). Even though I was standing in front of a blackboard or sitting in an office chair, I sweated through my underwear every single class. I bristle every time I hear some bureaucrat opine that teachers are lazy people who only work nine months out of the year but get paid for 12. In the first place, teachers do work all year round. In the second place, the good ones work harder than almost anyone else.
Nevertheless, I can say that the collapse was slow. Sort of like how pain drops a veil over you and you don't even realize your diminishing capacity until it becomes really obvious to you and everyone else. I was functioning, but barely. I was forgetting things. Not the important stuff of everyday life, but the things that enrich that life. I have several hobbies (believe it or not) that involve collecting materials. I would buy materials while on vacation, for example, then forget entirely where I put them. Not that I had time to make use of them anyway. Other things that I enjoyed simply went away altogether (like regularly writing this blog). My dojo schedule didn't just take over my life, it became my life.
And my students, for whom I was sacrificing all of that time? Several of them dropped out, as people do from time to time. Relocation, work schedules, etc. etc. Normal things. The one who begged for the extra time is still around, but I think he learned just as well whether he spent extra time with me as not. In fact, I have come back to subscribing to old Confucius - he's better off searching out those other three corners on his own. My providing the other corners did not make him a better budoka. Instead, it made him more dependent on me for things he should have been figuring out on his own.
Just like the collapse, recovery has also been slow. I have kept three days of practice, but one of them is short, and for me alone. Soon there will be a "course correction" so that I will be teaching closer to home, the purpose being that I can indulge in the idea of more sleep just like my students do. I reorganized my hobby materials so I can actually find things when I want them (a never-ending process, but at least now I know where stuff is). Just in time for gardening season. Just in time for maybe sitting outdoors on a nice evening with a beer and just looking at the plants growing. It's a start.
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