As an instructor you see various repeated experiences over the years. Ones such as places where a certain percentage of students begin to change certain techniques from what they’ve been shown, and always in the same way. Those situations aren’t universal, most people don’t do this, but there is an appreciable number that do.
This gives the long term instructor something else to concentrate on, to find a way to bridge the gap of those students, starting before they’ve made the change, and to learn more about the learning process in general.
BTW, what I currently do is when I begin to teach a new kata, I show everyone what can creep in at those locations. I share with them I believe it is something that some nervous systems have a propensity to do, and by showing this from the beginning it may help those individuals to stay fast to what they were taught, or if it doesn’t help them understand the correction they’ll receive when it does, shortening the time for correct performance.
An entirely different issue is when I arrive at an application potential, demonstrate it several times to people who’ve been running the kata for a long time, and then when I put them with a partner to work on that potential application, they turn it into something else, and not the kata.
While I’m far from perfect I’ve noticed I tend to pick up such when taught much faster than many of my students. I’ve always suspected it was working against the presence of another body moving at them that broke their confidence in the technique.
But I have many examples of this occurring. For example when Tris Sutrisno was showing my students his 2nd and 3rd level bunkai for several of his Shotokan Heian kata, this was done as technique exercises, on video you’d watch him show one thing and the students do something else all together. But as he was trained that Black Belts never say I can’t, he’d never correct them, instead he’d then go around and help them do what they were doing more correctly. This was based on his father’s practices of ‘the technique of no technique’. When visiting another school in Indonesia, and his father was asked to teach, he’d teach anything, fully, but so many anything’s that it was guaranteed nobody would walk out of there remembering what was shown.
That isn’t just their practice. I was invited to attend a Dan Insanto knife self defense clinic for two hours years ago. Well he had people try and stick him with knives and with his bare hands they’d be flying left and right. But when he started teaching the techniques he’d show a new one every 2 or 3 minutes. For those people fully in his system of study, it was technique review time, for the rest, technique of no technique. [While I found it interesting to observe, that wasn’t a practice I pursued and retained little from that clinic.]
In fact the early years I trained with Sherman Harrill his clinics taught so many applications, even knowing the Isshinryu kata, didn’t help most retain them. But he stressed it was the underlying principles that were the most important, and anyone who applied themselves, would walk away with enough to keep them busy for a long time. And in time more could be retained, with further training sessions.
Understanding how focus and awareness helps one learn and others learn is an involved secondary but major study to the Isshinryu system.
On Saturday I may have had some small breakthrough on the process with my students.
I was working on the piece of SunNuSu Kata, near the beginning where you turn 90 degrees to the left side, spread both arms out to the sides, then turn 90 degrees again to the left, and left open low block, right cross inside open parry and press and left spear hand.
Specifically I wanted to show them how I understood that section out of the Kyan Passai and the minor modifications Shimabuku Sensei made, still keeping the original Passai essence, IMVO.
The application potential I was showing was against somebody stepping in with their right hand to grab you. For the defense I was stepping across plane of their right foot (maybe 20 degrees or so) and using the double outer strikes to parry the attacking arm away (or a left open hand strike into their bicep, doing the same thing. Then as I understand the Kyan Passai, I followed that with a right inner knife hand to the attackers throat and a left inner knife hand to the other side of their throat.
[Remember as a study in application potential, I’m not suggesting somebody’s grab should be answered with hard strikes into the throat. Situational ethics is a different issue, but as this follows, there can be a logic depending on the situation.]
This is a good way to then look some of the different answers suggested by Shimabuku Sensei’s changes.
As things go, one of my students, a very slight woman with about 15 years of training, with all the rest of us much larger than she was, wasn’t able to use the kata and kept changing the technique to something else. For example she’d throw a higher open left side strike and her right hand would slide down to her side, which definitely wasn’t the kata.
Now we’re all much larger than she is, considerably so. But as this was just a basic study, the attacks weren’t pressing, just an arm going out. But as she kept trying, each time with a different application and not doing the kata which I’d demonstrate more times for her how to get her to do the kata became a point we all started working with.
And she’s not a poor karate-ka. When she knows a technique she hits harder than any of us and can tear into anybody with focused abandon. But in this case she wasn’t able to rely on Passai or SunNuSu (no difference on the opening movement of this).
Because we were taking time on this I think I’ve observed more closely than when this occurred previously (in everybody). It wasn’t she didn’t have faith in the technique. Here eyes were focused on the attack, and that focused eyesight was the cause of the change.
Now think of the kata, when you do that movement your eyes remain in the middle, you’re not looking somewhat to the left.
So seeing that, I began to have her do the kata and not look at the larger attacker looming over her. She was to use her peripheral vision to fully watch the attacker.
Once she began to keep her eyes focused on her center line, she began to sell the technique, and regardless of our size the movement created the opening.
Shades of ‘The Eye Must See All Sides’, isn’t it.
And it may be a long clue as to why a technique demonstrated is turned into something else by the next person to try.
No, I don’t think this is the whole issue, but I do believe I’ve made some strides in answering a piece of the puzzle.
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