To Teach is To Learn
A lot of people contact me with the express desire to learn how to become a Taichi Teacher. They often have the delusion that they can do a couple of courses, get a certificate and be on their way. I on the other hand never wanted to be a teacher I just wanted to learn the art.
However my teacher would always make us teach our younger Taichi siblings (in Taichi experiential terms – as they were often much older than we were) as he knew that the teaching was the best way to learn as long as you had an experienced guide who could help you out when you were unable to explain something or get through a particular learning barrier that the person you were trying to teach was experiencing.
The hardest thing to teach is the thing that came easiest to you, as you have no understanding as to how it is so difficult for others. It is easy to dismiss these people as inept, idiots who have no business wasting your time but the reality is that this is the greatest opportunity for learning that you will receive. It enables you to move from the state of unconscious competence to conscious competence which is the true understanding of what you are actually doing.
It is often the case that the very best practitioners cannot teach because they have never needed to examine what they are doing and how they do it. It is only when they lose or their abilities are on the wane that it becomes necessary for them to understand so that they can adapt what they do. Others who struggle and work hard to attain high ability are much better at teaching others because they have a better understanding of the issues that many people face in trying to learn.
I am still constantly surprised by the challenges of teaching some people techniques that I considered the most basic and have been been rewarded by having to re-evaluate the technique and understand a finer essence, a more fundamental formulation of the technique that they could eventually get to grips with.
Teaching has taught me many things and has improved my understanding and ability no end.
February 2, 2010 at 10:49 pm | Musings | No comment
No Comments »
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL