The power of words

We have an eager young man in our beginner Jiu-Jitsu group. He's been around long enough to have gone once through the basic cycle of the Gracie White-Belt curriculum. It's taken him 2 or 3 months to get this far, and he's facing more than 5 more before he will have completed the three required cycles for Blue Belt.

He's having none of that. He comes to the open mat session on Saturday. He's been working with Cosme, effectively getting an extra class per week. If he keeps this up he'll shave a third of his remaining time off. It's a smart thing to do for somebody that wants to advance quickly.

Anyhow, Cosme wasn't there today. He ended up with both Rob and I helping him out instead. He still got his extra class.

I don't teach much anymore. I'm a retired high-school teacher, and also spent a few decades teaching Karate.

In all that time teaching, I've seen a lot of mistakes, and made quite a few myself.

Some take a great deal of organization and planning to prevent, but some are so simple to correct and are so significant that it's surprising that everybody can't see them.

There is a ton of effort expended in education in evaluating students before new material is introduced. Have you ever been taught the same thing in school more than once? It's a waste of time and effort. The good news is that in a physical activity it's really easy to do. All you have to do is watch the students as they train. Instant feedback.

Sometimes there are easy fixes like that, sometimes for major problems.

In my teacher training, one professor mentioned casually that we should never tell students that material is, “easy.” He said we should always stress the parts that are difficult. I understood what he was saying but it didn't make a big impression on me until later in a real classroom.

I saw it in action in my first teaching job. I was to take over another teacher's class for a few weeks, and got to observe for a week or two ahead of time. It was a math class for kids who had severe difficulty with math.

The instructor would keep repeating how easy it all was. For the kids in that room, that was the exact wrong thing to say. It was difficult for them. What he was telling them was that, “for normal kids it's easy as pie, but you're all so stupid that you can't do it at all.”

He should have been saying something more like, “what we're doing today has a few tricks to it that mess everybody up, but we can work through that.” It doesn't matter if the teacher thinks it's easy or not.

In martial arts, saying something is easy sends an even worse message, although with less devastating consequences.

To martial arts students who hear you call something easy, and who then find it hard,  get the same message as the math kids I was talking about earlier. It tells them that they suck at martial arts.

To martial arts students who hear you call something easy, and don't find it difficult receive the message that they don't have to take things very seriously. It's easy, so of course they are able to do it effortlessly. They rush through, and ignore tips, waste time, and horse around. “No problem. It's easy.”

Of course, most students don't experience either problem from such a casual statement. Some do, but not many. The question becomes; why describe a technique as easy at all? There are potential problems, and there is also no upside to the statement. What good does it do to say it? What does either the student or the instructor gain from it?

The cure? Simple. Describe the difficulties in a technique, and try to include things you found hard when you first learned it.

How simple is that?