God Works in Mysterious Ways — (Atheist)Thoughts on Teaching

I believe that what most teachers want to do is pass on our personal experience and epiphanies to our students. Contrary to what some people think, I do not believe this to be very easy.

Why?

Well, let me tell you a small story about a Christian priest and some men in distress. Or maybe women, what do I know. The priest might also be a woman — it’s really not that important.
I believe using Christianity for my story is important mainly because it is one of the only cultures which it is still permissible to verbally shit upon, which is ironic to me since most people use science as a religion by simply repeating what they hear or read without ever fact-checking. Furthermore, all people hold some kind of belief and dogma — regardless of whether it is religion or something else.

Onwards we go!

It is wartime. A group of bereaved villagers enter their church, seeking comfort and consolidation. Many of them have lost their spouses, children, and are living from hand to mouth. Their distress has started to breed into resentment, which could bode ill both for each individual and for their community.

The priest listens, talks and eventually quotes the Bible with a fitting sentence for these kinds of situations (a sentence I much enjoy even though I am not Christian myself):
“God works in mysterious ways.”

To me, this sentence is a way of saying: Even though everything seems hellish now, now is now and tomorrow might be another day. Life does not revolve around you and these seemingly all consuming problems are simply the symptoms of a world in constant change. We all have ups and downs in our lives and if we act impulsively when in distress, we might come to regret our bitter actions when things turn around for the better.

Here is the issue though: Though the sentence: “God works in mysterious ways” is very fitting for this situation, a priest saying this to a group of people in distress, could very well use that sentence to keep those people in check. The idea that the world does not revolve around you, can easily become an insinuation to keep your head down, shutting up and to stop making trouble.

However, if the priest through conversation makes the villagers come to the realization that “God works in mysterious ways”, the sentence can become an anchor of hope and the belief that good things have yet to come.

The sentence remains the same but how it is received and interpreted might be very different, regardless of the priest’s intentions.

This is a potential issue for all teachers and students though I believe it is something that few teachers or students are aware of: condensing experience into a sentence or story to pass it on rarely conveys the meaning you would want it to.

So what do we learn from this and how do we apply it?

In my eyes that depends on whether you are the teacher or the student

For the teacher
As a teacher I hope you first of all consider that not everything you say gets perceived how you would want it to. This is especially important when having disagreements with students.

You might not be having a discussion about the same thing. Thus, part of being a good teacher demands that you try to convey the same idea in a thousand different ways to see what your student responds best to, rather than to find the “perfect way” of expressing something and beating your students over the head with it, again and again.

For the student
Always remember that your teachers are simply human and they are doing their best to convey years of rich experience with a rather simple medium; words. The words are simply artifacts for the experience. How you receive them is outside your teacher’s sphere of control. This means that it is not always fruitful to keep demanding an elaboration on a concept because in the end, you are the one who has to experience it for yourself. It also means that when your teacher sounds like they are holding you back, they might simply lack a way of transmitting their lesson in a way that sits well with you — so assume they are trying their best.

While these thoughts might seem fairly banal, I hope they will inspire to action, should it help you, rather than simply nodding your head and thinking: This is something I have heard before in one way or another.

Enjoy your conflicts.

Tools for Assessing Teaching Methods - Part 3

So where do we go from here?
If I presume, that readers are onboard with the idea, that there is no right or wrong technique but only upsides and downsides to every correction that we give, or technique that we teach, then how do we give corrections and provide a direction for our students?

Well, I still give corrections and directions for my students but I try to be aware of my “framing” of said corrections.

I define framing as the scenario that I as a teacher imagine my student to be in, when giving a correction. 
I believe all teachers have a framing for their corrections but I believe that few are aware of those framings.

Example
When I correct a kick that a student throwing in Capoeira, on the pads or with a partner, I have framed this correction through a specific but imaginary scenario. 
Often, the imagined scenario corresponds with the current learning scenario; the distance of the pad-holder/partner to the other student is the same in my head as what I see in front of me, the rhythm of the kick to the counter kick is the same as in the training situation, the student is not too tired etc. 

Why would I call this an imaginary scenario, when it is based on what happens in front of my eyes? 

Because even though I correct based on what I see in front of me, the correction is not only for the student to utilize here and now in this one specific learning scenario. 
The correction is meant for the student to bring with them in similar scenarios in the future and to repurpose to use in scenarios that might look very different.

Secondly, when correcting a student’s kick, I am imagining that I know for sure that their future kicks will carry the same mistakes (and benefits). This is not something I know, this is something I imagine. We all know that our own abilities vary and that each action varies from execution to execution. So when correcting a student it requires having observed that student for a long time, to be statistically certain, that a correction is very relevant to that student and not just a correction on some random mistake.

Now, if you can commit to the idea that corrections are mainly based on imaginary scenarios, let us move on.

At times, the imagined scenario does not correlate to the current learning situation when I, as a teacher, might have a specific focus point, which generates a different kind of framing than the one in front of me. 

Example
I am working on power with my students but I start focusing on the student’s balance, while they throw the kick for power, and I start giving balance corrections.
“Of course”, the power and balance of the kick optimally goes hand in hand, but sometimes this correction comes because I, looking at the student, (re)realized that if they throw all they have into the kick, simply trying to follow my instructions, they are left open to counters - this can be a confusing scenario for the student, if I do not explain my change in framing. Spontaneous changes in framing can lead to even more confusing scenarios with teachers who are not even aware of their own change in framing - or the fact that they frame their corrections at all.

The tools for assessment
So here is how I assess my teaching material and corrections, I ask myself: “How am I framing the material that I am teaching and in what light should my corrections therefore be presented?”
I do this to move away from the illusion that I am teaching right or wrong corrections.
I have defined my framings through three fairly broad categories:

1. The long term frame.

2. The intuitive frame.

3. The aesthetic frame.

Note: I believe that these categories, like techniques, are constructs and somewhat arbitrary. These are three categories that allow for somewhat detailed scrutiny (of both myself and others), while still keeping an intuitive flow in my classes and also reminding me, that I am just a human who makes a lot of shit up as I go.

I will use the Chin-Up as an example on all three types of framing.

The long term frame
This is when teachers provide material, technical cues or answer with a long term perspective, that beginners simply do not have:
This is where teachers can really shine and why someone with more experience than ourselves is invaluable for development within a discipline.

Retracting and depressing your scapula in a chin-up is not intuitive or easy and often we teach it in isolation from the full chin-up motion, so it is not even directly connected to the exercise.

“Why do we do it?” a lot of students ask.

“Because that’s the right way of doing a chin-up” many teachers will answer...

Right how? It's not intuitive and for many people it would take longer to learn a chin-up with scapula retraction than one without- so in what way is it the right way?

Instead of considering scapula retraction and depression right, I would consider it “beneficial in the long run”. The Chin-up isn't the and-all and be-all of pulling movements and with that in mind, the teacher can make the hard choice on behalf of our students: Retracting and depressing the scapula so that one can recruit more muscle groups, both to assist us in pulling when it comes to harder variations of the Chin-up, for example One Arm Chin-Up, and also to divide the stress onto bigger portions of the body.
We challenge our students and make them walk the long and hard road so that in the long run, they will be stronger and have more possibilities.

The intuitive frame
I define the intuitive frame as small technical cues, that the student could have stumbled upon themselves but that the teacher makes the student aware of, to help shorten the learning process. 
Close training partners, with the same level of experience, can often be just as good at this as a teacher can, since it does not require knowledge of that which one does not currently see in front of one’s eyes. 
In the chin-up, a good example is: “Try supinating your hands”, palms facing you,  (yes, I know, pronated hands are considered a pull-up).
Many people, not experienced in pulling initially grabs the bar in a pronated fashion (palms facing away from them). 
For a lot of people, this makes pulling harder, so a teacher can cue the less experienced person to supinate their forearms, to provide them with the experience that pulling oneself towards a bar is actually manageable. 
Repeating myself, the intuitively framed correction is something that a lot of people could have discovered given time but that many teachers provide their students with, to shorten the learning process (whether the teacher knows, this is why they do it or not).

Other examples could be:

In Parkour: “Look where you land, in order to place your feet better”

In fighting: “Keep your hands/arms close to your head and body when guarding yourself”.

These corrections/cues don’t require a lot of extra effort and mostly makes executing a technique easier.

The aesthetic frame
This one to me is the most interesting AND the most overlooked. 
How come most first generations of any given sport move more crudely than subsequent generations?How come most martial arts, designed to destroy people as effectively as possible look aesthetically pleasing?
Probably because we as humans takes cues and correct with our eyes more than any other sense. No teacher has X-Ray vision and no teacher can calculate all the internal and external factors that go into executing a technique, so we do a general assessment of what we see fit that with our current theme of teaching and thereby approve or disapprove of the way the student carried out the given technique. 
Here is an example: A teacher asks someone to move softly - often with the idea of diminishing stress on the body. As soon as we have two people who are both fairly experienced within a discipline and already move without a sound, most teachers will probably applaud the one who moves more pleasingly - regardless of whether the teacher is aware of this or not. 

IF the teacher IS aware of this fact it is often defended with arguments like: “You can see that that person move more softly!” or “Can’t you see that that person has more control?”
Well, maybe you can and maybe you can’t but here’s some things that you definitely can NOT see - and these are just a few examples:

• You can NOT see how stress of impact is dispersed among the joints of a person landing. 

• You can NOT see how many kilos of impact a person is landing with.

• You can NOT see how much damage specific joints or tissue sustain when executing a technique in one given way and not another.

You might be able to assume and you might assume correctly but if you with to teach in a responsible way, admitting that you assume is one of the first steps.
It should also make you reflect upon how often you correct on a superficial representation of a function rather than a function.fa

Back to the chin-up:

Why do we have our arms approximately shoulder distance apart and why do we touch shoulders/chest to the bar when doing a chin-up? Because, this is the ‘Full Range of Motion’ (ROM) chin-up that sets the standard and other variations of the chin-up are… well, variations.
But if the reason for the parameters of the standard/proper chin-up is full ROM, then we can do variations of the chin-up that would require more ROM, like pulling to the navel while leaning slightly back - as to not transition into the push of a muscle-up.
To this, I heard people say: “Well, that is a LOT harder than the ‘standard’ chin-up and therefore would be unreasonable to demand!” Well, yes it is, but then that logic could be applied to the ‘standard’ chin-up as well and it would be a lot easier to just tell people that however high they could pull themselves from the get go, would be considered their personal chin-up.

I’m saying this, not to abolish standards or progressions but to make teachers aware, how any variation, progression or starting position of a movement could have been considered ‘the standard’ had history played out slightly different and, repeating myself, how our standards are very often superficial representations of functions or principals.

In this regard I would like to quote Strongcamps aka. D.J. Murakami who wrote:

“The designated boundaries of a ROM are cultural constructs”.

To me this reflects that just like some cultures consider are proper greeting a hug, some consider it the shaking of hands and some consider it a bow, the standards set for any given movement is an intersubjective agreement. If you teach your kids that shaking hands is the only proper way to greet someone and not A way to greet someone, they might be confused or angry when clashing with a culture where something else is considered the norm.
In the same way, the job of teachers is to provide our students with possibilities, and I really do believe this, then it is important to tell them that the standards we have set are just SOME standards we have set and they can redefine those standards once they have gotten to know them.

Thereby, the students might grow up to become physically cultured movers/athletes (thank you Hunter Fitness), who can assess different contexts and re-purpose the tools they have been given to fit different circumstances. 

Tools for Assessing Teaching Methods — Part 2.5

You Are Not Teaching What You Think You Are

As mentioned in the previous essay; there are many ways to execute the same technique — as an example, look at two world class boxers, pick whomever you would like, and study their different approaches to the same attack or defence techniques. You might realize that there are many ways to skin a cat.
In this regard, technique might internally be viewed as one’s own approach to a continuous, sometimes tedious physical practice. Externally, technique might be viewed as an expression of someone’s approach to a continuous physical practice.

I say this because the one common denominator between all professional athletes or physical performers is continuous practice, beyond any explanation or breakdown of technique is the fact that you have to train for hours, months or years in order to get better.
So while technique and technical cues might be viewed as the be-all and and-all of learning, practice is more likely the be-all and end-all of learning, 
with technique being a more accessible approach to that practice.

With this in mind, I would like to bring up a fairly radical notion, at least in the eyes of some people:
All you corrections as a teacher are based on imaginary scenarios that are only slightly rooted in reality!

What do I mean by this? You ask.
Well, allow me to elaborate.

Let me answer the question by posing another question: How statistically valid is a single occurrence?
Most people who are familiar with the basics of statistics would answer; not at all.
A one time occurrence in a specific sphere is not indicative of general occurrences within that sphere. In spite of this, teachers very often tend to look at an execution of a technique, find a mistake that they are dissatisfied with (or a thing, they believe, the student could improve) and then correct it, for when the technique is carried out next time.

Just to be clear, I am not innocent of this. I have made this mistake in the past and will probably fall into the trap again from time to time. I find it important to acknowledge this, in order to develop one’s practice and move on.

Here is the problem with this approach: A single occurrence is not indicative of a general tendency. Almost everyone will agree to having experienced, that fairly complex actions vary from execution to execution; we all go from remembering A and B while forgetting C to remembering B but forgetting A and C etc. Only very rarely do we seem to include A, B and C at once, making the action seem perfectly executed. Therefore, as a teacher, it takes quite a while to get to know a student well enough to recognize their habits and yet, many teachers I have had say things like: “You tend to…” after having only had you in class once.

Some teachers might disagree with this. A lot of people might actually disagree with this.
In this case, I suggest you read Black Swan by Nicholas Nassim Taleb and Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahnemann, to get a basic understanding of concepts like ‘regression to the mean’, ‘Black Swan occurrences’, ‘’confirmation bias’ and the lack of statistical evidence to support the validity of most premonitions by most so called experts within a vast array of fields.

Now, for those of you who are onboard with the idea, that a single occurrence in the past is not indicative of what happens in the future, let us continue by asking the next question:

What then are we correcting?

Well, we are not correcting the past, because the past cannot be changed. So even though our correction is anchored in what we saw in the past, we can not make the student change that.

We are rarely correcting what happens in the present, especially with movement, since it often goes to fast. At times, most teachers have experienced shouting a correction at a student, right before the student performed whichever technique they are working on. Sometimes, this makes the student apply that correction without judgement to the joy of both student and teacher.
However, as we already discussed, this is a one time occurrence and not necessarily an indication of a general change in the student’s habits.
Furthermore, this is not correcting the present but attempting to correct the future, since there is no telling whether the student would have applied that correction themselves or not.

So we are correcting the future then?

Well, no, but this is what most teachers are trying to correct, not realising that this is what they attempt to do.
Can we predict the future? No. So what do we do? We do what all humans do, we use the past as an indication of what we think will happen in the future. In other words, we IMAGINE a future based on past occurrences. A teacher watches a student executing a certain technique, often a statistically insignificant amount of times, the teacher then imagine how that student will perform this skill in the future and gives corrections based on that.

First of all, we have no honest idea as to what the future holds. Secondly, we are teaching people who are on an ongoing learning curve and we do not know if the technical cues we throw at them, is not something they themselves would have done on their next attempt.

All this being said, I am not sure that there a lot of ways around this kind of thinking, which is why this collection of writings is about assessing one’s teaching methods and not about changing them.
By making oneself aware of the “fact” that the corrections we give are often, if not always, based on imagination and fantasy, I hope to exceed the inherent limitations of this.

In my next article I will post my current approach to evaluating what kind of imaginary scenarios I project for my students and how to deal with those scenarios.

Coming up: The tools!

what is strength?

A question that I feel is important to ask yourself, for anyone involved with physical activity.
“The ability to perform explosive feats of strength, like lifting weights or jumping really high!” (Force Production/Force Development) is an answer I receive often in my classes and lectures.


But how about defining it in broader terms:
“The capacity to instantly adapt” and/or “The ability of the body to produce force to overcome a certain load” are both very good answers.


This begs the next question: When do we “instantly adapt” or “overcome loads”? Well, all the time, quite frankly.


From walking down stairs without falling, something many take for granted, but a strength-based skill that toddlers have yet to develop and that many older people forget to exercise, to slowly bringing your leg towards your face like a ballet dancer, which many people would classify as flexibility. 
In both of these situation, and all in between, we overcome the load of gravity.


Why is this important?


It's important because it means that everything is a skill that one can train to get better at.
I have often met Crossfitters or climbers saying: “I'm not flexible enough for that” or dancers saying “I will never be strong enough for that!”
But of course not, you haven't trained it and as with everything, you start from the beginning. Redefining strength is also  important because it means, that a given strength exercise, like front squats, might improve your ankle mobility more than any calf stretch you ever did.


I hope this will set some thoughts in motion.

self-serving techniques

"But what is the PURPOSE of the head to tail connection?" a student asked while Sophia Mage was teaching her floorwork. .

I, Thais, personally do not believe the Head-Tail connection/Zambrano Wave has any "real" purpose.
.

MAYBE, it has the function of adding complexity to your movement, which could be useful in certain situations but maybe it is purely aesthetic which to Sophia and I is fine, since we're dealing with dance.
.

To elaborate:
Sure, the connection helps people get up from the floor while performing the aesthetics that are inherent in Flying Low but in that case, it's a self-serving function/purpose. 
If someone tried to grab you while clinching or kick you in the face while you were lying down, I'm pretty sure that you would do a fast flinching movement to try to get up/away from the floor and not start a sequenced spinal wave.
.

But the question posed epitomizes one of our time's biggest challenges in contemporary dance/art, to me at least: The search for purpose and functionality to validate our practice.
The students are looking for the purpose and the teachers are tempted to provide it. .

In the long run, I believe it paralyzes us, as we always have to find functional purpose in order to validate our artistic practice.
But isn't art inherently without purpose (to a certain extent)?
Is that not what art gives us: It gives us uncertainty, chaos, emotions and many other things that are intangible and therefore beautiful?
.

If we constantly go looking for purpose in our art, and in the physical training representing this art,  then I believe, we are slowly diminishing our own artistic possibilities and slwoly digging our own graves as artists.

COMPROMISE - The [Im]Perfect Solution.

Thoughts after teathcing Danish Dance Theater - Part 2


Tired? Drink an extra cup of coffee and it will likely be an effective pick-me-up. Do this 4 days in a row, and that extra dose of caffeine will no longer be as effective. .

So for it to be effective again you need to up the dose one more time or decrease it, waiting for your tolerance to reset.

The same goes for your training load, for the purposes of increasing work capacity (performance) or decreasing injuries.

Our bodies adjust to the solutions we give to it. Your capacity for “X” will eventually adjust to the new baseline and every tool and solution becomes the new ‘status quo’.

In the same way, dancers are constantly trying to find the solution for fatigue and injuries rather than applying variation and cycling their tools for recovery.
Dance schools, companies, choreographers and/or dancers themselves, cope by trying to find the “perfect”, constant balance in terms of workload, finding a static compromise between workload and time off - I will refer to this as The Static Balance.


The Static Balance, generally speaking, consists of a warm up, 5 - 10 hours of daily work, and one to two days off per week.
I do not believe this to be a very good long term solution, neither in terms of minimizing injuries, nor in terms of sparking inspiration or creativity. .
Instead of trying to find the perfect compromise/the static balance, just like with caffeine, I would recommend a Dynamic Balance: Cycling between work that is intense and a bit heavier than we would choose intuitively and lighter work with a bit more rest than what what feels productive. Both in smaller cycles and bigger cycles.


In a lot of ways, very basic sports science/physiology but often overlooked or not applied. .

A DISCOURSE OF FRAGILITY AND COMPROMISE

Is something I'm trying really hard to move away from in the world of dance!

Dancers are incredibly capable and versatile movers throwing themselves on the floor, carrying other people around and bending their bodies in impossible angles and yet they often talk about the body as something very fragile.

"Don't put weight on the knees!" - I guess BJJ people didn't get the memo.
"Jumping on concrete gives you shinsplints!" I guess parkour people didn't get the memo. . "If it makes your back hurt, it's inherently dangerous!" - Then working in an office is inherently dangerous for many people...


MAYBE, don't do things like a fanatic at all times: Dose your stress appropriately, cycle it, push yourself a bit beyond at times and then take proper rest (away from the people, your goals and your phone at other times.
Doing this, I believe, you can adapt to almost everything. .

Everyone has pain and injuries from time to time just like everyone gets sad and angry at times so let's not treat injuries like something alien.


Dancers are amazing movers/artists who once in while get overworked - let's enjoy the "amazing mover" part a bit more!


To be continued

Tools for Assessing Teaching Methods in Physical Disciplines — Part 2

Two conversations

As the first part of the essay might seem a bit too vague or speculative, I wanted to present two encounters and conversations: One with a student (who is a teacher himself) and one with a co-teacher.

Photo Credit: Christoffer Clausen

1. The puzzled student

A student came to me after class, completely baffled, because I gave different cues to a movement in this class, than last time I taught it — which was several months prior. He said, and I am paraphrasing: “I have practised this technique like a mad man, specifically how you told me to, and now you say that I should do it in a different way. Why?”

Surprisingly, he seemed oblivious to the idea, that we had often discussed and agreed upon, that there are MANY ways to perform a technique since it depends on the level of the student, the situation within which the technique is taught and the greater historical, physical and social context within which the technique is taught.

For example, the student himself might have developed since last time he got a specific correction from me: In the early stages of learning someone might need to put more effort and attention into a movement in order to perform it in accordance with set parameters while in the later stages, a student might need to let go of his or her ideas about a movement and put less effort into it, in order to make it flow. One student might need to push the hip slightly more forward for a given movement and another might need to go easy on “the forward pushing of the hip”.

Again, this might seem like banal examples, that will make most people roll their eyes in obvious agreement, however, I urge you to consider: How often do you present your correction with this level of complexity in your explanations, when you have +15 students to attend to and only 90 minutes to bring your points across?

Going back to a previous point: Most students crave concrete answers and most teachers feel compelled to provide them. If we never discuss the fact that our answers leave out a myriad of potential factors, with our students, then we might provide them with a lot of clear answers in the short run but are we providing them with food for thought and the ability to re-purpose our directions and answers to different situations? If not, I think we’re depriving them of possibilities and I believe that the role of a teacher is to PROVIDE your students with possibilities.

2. Teaching the RIGHT Chin-up

When planning strength classes with a co-teacher, we talked about whether we taught our students to pull their shoulder blades back and down (scapula retraction and depression) because it made the chin-up as a movement easier or because it made it harder (if advocating for difficulty confuses some readers, I will get back to this).

My co-teacher said, that it would benefit the process by making the chin-up easier, also with an insinuation that it would make it “better” and I believed, that it would benefit the process by making the chin-up harder. We discussed this for quite a while.

This is where it gets interesting because we, both teachers and humans in general, have a tendency to talk about whether certain parameters, for example pulling your shoulder blades back and down, ULTIMATELY benefits a process. However, after this conversation, and all the time since, I had to think; benefits the process under which conditions and in which greater context?

In recent years isolating the shoulder blades in pulling (scapula retraction and /or depression) has become trendy among strength coaches and movement teachers, this trend comes mainly from gymnastic strength work.

It is easy to learn? Nope!

For many people, it is very difficult and not very intuitive to isolate the shoulders in pulling, the arms flexes, quite naturally at the elbow for most when they pull. However, incorporating the isolated pulls and one’s strength training will give the student an added capacity for straight arm work in the long run and it will facilitate some of the more difficult patterns where one can also bend the arms.

I do believe, that many teachers of strength and conditioning knows, that this is the recent history behind the scapula retraction and protraction, especially since it is a new trend but a few teachers do not. Already now, some people are teaching this as “the way to do a chin-up” (“Chin-ups, you’ve been doing it wrong all along.com”). With time, I foresee that more and more people will incorporate the isolated use of the shoulder blades as “the right/best way of doing a chin-up”.

Again, the best way under which conditions and in which greater context?

If the goal simply was to teach someone to do a chin-up in the shortest time, most people with rudimentary pulling strength would learn it quicker, if they did not have to learn the isolation of the shoulder blades for it to be considered a correct chin-up.

On the other hand, it is important to remember, that retracting and depressing the scapula is very helpful later on, when learning more difficult pulling patterns.

So instead of trying to convey the “proper way” of executing a technique to your students or discussing the best teaching techniques with your co-teachers maybe it is important to establish a discourse that focuses on upsides, downsides and the context within which a specific technique, or even discipline, is taught.

I will share my tools for assessing context in the third and final part of the essay.

3. Postscript — In a different context

A bunch of my friends, that I have discussed these ideas with asked me, if my thoughts could relate to teaching that was not movement oriented. Here is an attempt at that.

Learning the discipline required to sit down and shut up, in order to learn in a school setting, is by no means easy or pain free for children. However, in the long run it gives the children tools for easier learning in the setting of most classrooms — a setting that we have shaped and defined ourselves.

What seems hard in the beginning might facilitate a process later on.

Furthermore, though we will never truly know, these tools of sitting still and paying attention, longer than what comes naturally to us, might be of help in other situations in life.

Note that I am NOT saying that the current classroom format is the most optimal way of learning, it is just A way of learning and there are techniques that facilitate learning within that setting. Now, if the goal was to shape students who expressed the most interest in learning, the tools to best facilitate that outcome might be different: For example allowing the students to question the curriculum and look at the curriculum from different perspectives. While engaging with learning material on your own terms and through curiosity might seem great, it does not always teach you the discipline required to sit down and finish work for a deadline later on in life — especially a deadline for a project that only you are invested in.

What seems easy and nice at first might complicate things later on.

Both of these qualities; the expression of discipline and attention and the expression of joy and eagerness to learn, are representations of “good students” in the eyes of many teachers — though often by very different kinds of teachers and in different setting. The fact that these qualities are deemed inherently good qualities and not just qualities representative of A way of doing things, makes me wonder how often people are aware of the “meta-framework” (the ideas that shape our ideas) we operate within, when setting criteria for success or “what is good”.

Both qualities facilitate learning, although often in slightly different contexts, so rather than committing to shaping one kind of student, which works very well within one kind of setting, maybe there is sense in creating versatile student, as well as teachers, that can operate well within many different situations.

Tools for Assessing Teaching Methods in Physical Disciplines — Part 1

I do not believe in definite or objective truths and I try to make my actions reflect that.

Observing some of the teachers I know and encounter, most seem to comply with the same belief. However, subsequent actions and discourse does not seem to reflect this attitude fully.

I speak as an observer and teacher of several physical disciplines (contemporary dance, parkour and acrobatics among others). As soon as we (we being teachers of movement) move into the world of teaching physicality, from the world of my experience, many teachers often turn their methods and techniques into dogmatic truths that their students have to learn by heart.

This obsession with teaching our students (and ourselves) to perform in the “right way” makes it difficult for us to take a step back. We become less apt at assessing our own teaching tools and techniques as to what they truly offer. It also becomes even harder to tailor our tools to specific students or situations, limiting the true potential of what our students can achieve.

I truly believe that setting parameters for success and establishing clear terminology is important for physical development. However, I propose that we (again, all teachers of physical disciplines) remind ourselves often that we invented that terminology and those parameters. In that way, we can discard them, repurpose them and improve them, to get the most out of our tools. There are ways of “learning by discarding” and technique is not finite.

This premise is the most important part of this essay. From here, you are free to drop out of the conversation. But reading onwards might clarify the importance, depth, and complexity of this theory. Everything is man-made, if you understand this, you will understand how to improve, erase, and reevaluate your own process as you are doing it.

As banal as this may seem, ask yourself: how are you teaching in a way that improves you, your students, and your own teaching capacity? Are you able to assess and adapt your tools to the ever-changing landscape of physical education?

To be continued.