The White Belt in us all

Belts are amazing things.  They provide a grip point for tobi otoshi, or belt chokes. They hold our gi tops closed so we aren’t showing off our pale flabby stomachs (what just me?), they let us know our place in line, and give us a very very rough guestimate at the skill of the training partner we face, they also tell us our duty to protect and teach or to observe and seek knowledge.

However belts are so much more, they are Rope Makiwara, they are tension ropes for throw drills and for solo drills, they are stretching aids for a variety of stretches turning partnered stretches into solo stretches, they are guide ropes, drill lines, impromptu agility ladders, games markers and restricted.

I use a spare belt for all of these tasks, a white belt I keep in my training bag. It’s been in there for a long time, and has seen service as all of the above, and as a spare belt to tie closed a students top when they forget their own.

However most of these uses for my trusty white are new, in fact some of them I only learnt about 2 weeks ago. Some I admit such as markers for games have been about since my first few times carrying it, but most are new.

So the question becomes why is the belt there. The truth is it is there for a very personal reason. As I have spoken about before in this blog. Being a black belt can be a wonderful thing, it can also lead us to be perhaps a little bit forgetful about the fact that we are the perpetual student, the perpetuallearner. Without the urge to learn, whether it is new martial skills, new training skills, new teaching methods, new psycgology then we fail as a teacher. My white belt found its way into my bag originally as a physical manifestation of this. I may wear black, but if you look in my bag you will see white. Why because I am forever a student.

The Learning Clock, ticking down.

The issue I wanted to write about today is alternatively called a couple of things by myself, but I think probably the most expressive is the teaching clock. And in this matter I don’t really mean the clock on your wall, but I am talking about the amount of time you have a student for.

And in reality this doesn’t just apply to martial arts but to all teaching. The teaching clock could be said to have three hands. The Absolute hand, this hand counts down the amount of time you’re going to have that student, whether this is defined by the course or you or merely by your students interest; The focus hand, this hand is determined mostly by your student, but as a teacher you have a massive role to play in determining this hand, this hand circles the clock with each new thing you try to teach or new lesson you begin and it shows how long your student will focus for; the last hand is the hardest for us to influence, this is the Dedication hand, how much of “their” time the student will give to practising, thinking about, or looking at what you have shown them.

Why is it important for a teacher to know this clock, to learn to read it better than the clock on their wall?  because we can do more harm than good by making assumptions about this clock.

A good example and one I used in a conversation recently was self defence classes verses traditional art classes. A self defence class is often a time limited thing, they are set up as courses, 6 weeks, 2 months, or as terms. This means we are likely to have far less time with our students, a far faster absolute hand counting down to when the student leaves, this means that going through the slow but ultimately very effective and rewarding process of teaching traditional basics is often the wrong route. To do this we must first dismantle our students instincts and techniques and build them back in a different way, we must tell them how to move, which muscle and when, where they strike, and at first this makes them weaker, so with a short absolute hand this is often a bad idea. Instead with a short absolute hand we must instead think about giving something that can be learned quickly and will improve our students.

The next difference is the focus hand, a self defence class, ironically has a much longer focus hand in general, this is because people sign up for these classes with a very good knowledge of what is coming, they are prepared and ready to focus and often sign up entirely by their own choice. They also tend to be older than the average starting traditional student, so while we might spend time working to extend the focus hand on our traditional students often this time is wasted time on a self defence class.

The dedication hand is an odd one and it varies wildly, this can depend in a major way on the students choices, their lifestyle and history. Some people will take what you teach them refine and perfect it, others will rely upon you to refined and perfect it. We should always do our best to improve our students dedication, to length this hand and make them spend more of their own time practising, but sometimes in this we are left to fickle fate. However all my teaching friends, whether martial artists or not, remember, you are not to blame if your student does not practise or dedicate their time to what you teach, do your best to encourage them to, but if they don’t and they fail then it is not you, it is your student, do not become upset by the failures of students who do not desire to learn.

The Implicit Unconcious Osmotic Dojo‏

Very few people will know what I mean when I say Osmotic learning, but hopefully more will be familiar with the terms unconscious or Implicit learning. A thing that is implicit just is, and something learned implicitly just is learnt.

Despite what the modern world seems to believe; with schools, colleges, universities. E-learning, short courses, night class, classroom based career development courses, and many more things besides; a majority of human knowledge is still learned implicitly it is still absorbed almost accidentally like fluids passing from one place to another through osmosis. One reason the modern world struggles to accept that unconscious learning is one of the major sources of our knowledge about the world around us is that allot of this knowledge is so implicit as to not be thought of as knowledge, after all the sky is blue, water is wet, and things fall down when you drop them, we don’t consider these things to be knowledge to be things we have learnt, but in fact they are.

For the most part though, this osmotic knowledge is more to do with society, social norms, body language and hand gestures, we learn these things not by being taught them but by seeing them over and over again and by living them.

So why is this important for the dojo? I hear you cry out in frustration as I ramble on. For several reasons this is perhaps the most important thing to remember when teaching in a dojo.

The first reason is because your students are absorbing everything, even if it doesn’t seem like it, and this unconscious undirected absorption of knowledge can be a blessing or a curse. Students will pick up bad habits from each other and importantly from you by accident, without ever being taught them. Students will learn behaviour, what is and isn’t acceptable. Students will learn forms of address, use of language, and where to stand. In the dojo where this isn’t considered and where the instructor ignores this accidental learning the result is random, so it is important.

The second reason is what your student brings with them. Every student has a life time of knowledge, whether it’s a 6 year life time, or a 60 year life time. The ‘classroom’ knowledge they bring with them isn’t really a big concern, this knowledge was learnt in the classroom so it’s there as an education to be used and taken up when needed but it lies passive, dormant, for the most part. The osmotic knowledge they bring with them however is never quite so willing to stay quiet, instead it leaps out of them in every word and gesture, every thought and feeling. Ask a student new through your dojo doors with no training at all to punch a punch bag. 80% of students will throw a right handed hook. Why? Because this is how you throw a punch, this is what a punch looks like. Who taught your student that? books, radio, but mostly TV. However if you look at a baby, or toddler hit something they don’t throw a hook, they hit hammer fist from above the head downward… why? Because we are descended from apes and this motion is how our muscles are designed to exert force from birth; though mainly for climbing and clinging. But this isn’t the only osmotic knowledge, the thought most fights start with a right hook leads our students astray, the idea that certain ‘truths’ exist means there is allot of falsehood we should be aware of and looking to adjust.

The third reason is yourself, you have learnt all these things by osmosis too, all these implicit and unconscious things through your life, you bring them with you into the dojo, and you give them to your students by the spade load. You might tell your students that fighting almost always ends in a grab, but when they watch you fight you never grab. So you are teaching them that fights don’t always end in a grab and also that you lie. Contradicting yourself with unconscious learning even as you push forward conscious knowledge. Your expectations and beliefs about fighting, your martial art, even the world around you are implicit in your actions and absorbed by your students.

We all have things we have learnt by osmosis that affect our beliefs of competition, sport, training, fighting, self defence, by looking at what osmotic knowledge we are bringing to these things, and what osmotic knowledge we are developing in the dojo we can enhance our training and the training around us.

We can however can start to guide osmotic learning, and we already do without thinking about it, by bringing skilled students and respectful students into being senpai and by praising students for doing things well.

And as a final note, if you want a book that is about something entirely different but still has some interesting points about osmotic absorbed knowledge and ideas, try Try Gift of Fear by Gavin Debecker.

The Mats of Consent

There has always been a discussion about consent, this normally refers to sexual consent, and the discussion is a polarising one.

People fall into two camps, not necessarily because they are part of those camps but because those two camps are in deep deep holes, and sometimes we fall into the holes even if we don’t particularly enjoy the hole, and sometimes we are pushed into a hole.

Let me start by being clear. I am not a rape apologist, I do not approve of or support rapists or sexual assault. And I am a believer in the idea in some states in america where 3 violent offences of any kind land you a life sentence because obviously you can’t correct your behaviour. However consent can be a fuzzy subject in some cases. I have always thought about this subject and left it be, as said in my last post, I find it easier not to argue with people whose minds are set on believing a single thing.

But as said in my previous post, I try to balance my perspectives and now I have a blog. So lets talk about Consent, recently I said someone speak about rape using the analogue of a cup of tea, in that it’s ok to offer it or ask for it, but stealing someone else’s cup of tea or pouring the cup of tea you made down someone’s throat is not acceptable. This is a less nuanced version but the point is the same.

And with this I agree. But lets talk about it from another perspective, one allot of martial artists will understand, the consent of the mats. Consent is an agreement, it is a verbal, written, implied or direct permission or agreement to do or take part in a specific action or collection of actions. When it comes to martial arts, the very act of stepping onto the mats is an act of consent, it is consenting to the training session.

But as in the real world away from the mats we often end up giving consent for things we don’t fully understand, whether we are new to the class, the instructor has something different to normal planned, or we have something different going on with ourselves, so as with the real world the giving of our consent by setting our feet on the mats can be taken back, but we have to be fair in how we do it. The same with when we are being given consent, when a fellow martial artist bows to me at the start of a training match they are giving me consent to train with them, they are agreeing that we are going to train.

But if we are by expectation going to do a light contact or point based training match then if I begin to strike my training partner in a way suitable to heavy contact then I am breaching the agreement we have made by bowing to each other with the expectation of light contact. I have experienced this plenty of times myself, I have gone to train with someone and the sensei has declared it light contact training, I have bowed and begun my light contact training only to find my training partner has hold of my collar and blackened my eye.

This is not to say I don’t do hard or heavy contact training, but my expectation, my consent at that time was for light contact, and it erodes the trust in that training partner that they breach that agreement. And this is the way it is outside of the Dojo as well. Consent even direct verbal consent is based on a thousand subtleties of situation and event, it is a complex situation.

Those who chant the phrase “no means no” are right, it does indeed and I don’t dispute this: but just because no means no, doesn’t mean that yes means yes. Consent is a simple thing, but also complex, and difficult to understand at times. The best method, both on the mats and in the world is to be sure and ask. But even then we wont always get things right.

But all of us should strive both to be clear about the consent we grant, and clear about the consents we accept. Rape is wrong, treat consent as you treat it in the dojo, no means no, yes means yes to the agreement made, and even then even within that agreement and situation a yes is not permanent, or forever, it can be taken back. If a partner agrees to full contact training and then gets his nose broken, and says stop, the original consent ends.

Words from the Dojo Opens

Hey Everyone,

I have been a martial artist most of my life now, and its varied, from travelling to other countries to train with amazing instructors through to only being able to visit the dojo once every few weeks when my work schedule allowed.

Throughout my time as a martial artist I have kept back from the debates, arguments and keyboard warrior antics of some. Whether bad mouthing other practitioners on the edge of the mats or arguing over the validity of an art on-line, I have kept my mouth closed for the simple reason, everyone had a right to their opinion and it wasn’t my place or right to be unpleasant with or about others because they didn’t agree with mine.

Sometimes I have had to bite my tongue, when I hear people talk about something and I have disagreed strongly, sometimes even feeling that they are factually wrong. But whenever I felt that someone was factually wrong I always reminded myself of a story I was told by a university professor friend. They had a debate in class that lasted an entire year, “can whales and stingray fly?” a simple question and everyone will already have, on reflex, said “NO”.
But the debate dragged on, first pushed by the professor and then championed by students. The end result was that in fact there are three distinct answers to the question. No, Maybe, And Yes. And which answer was factually right depended on which scientific journal or source of information you used. Not because one was wrong and one was right, but because to answer the question you first had to define a specific meaning for the word ‘Flight’ what is flight, what is to fly. And they found that different sources all of which were deemed scientifically valid defined flight differently and some of those definitions allowed for whales and stingray moving through water to be considered flight. And then the debate expanded, according to some definitions of flight a creature flighting on a planet other than earth is not in fact flying because flight specifically required either “air” or to be “above the surface of the earth”. This lead to an argument on what “air” is.

The point is simple, sometimes we see things as being facts when in fact they are opinions, not necessarily our opinions, not even necessarily opinions in the sense of what we like, or what we think, but opinions of knowledge of definition and of meaning.

This doesn’t mean that everyone is always right, but it always left me more willing to let someone have their opinion and leave it be, than argue the toss of it and get no where.

Now I have opened a blog, simply to talk about my opinions, my beliefs and what I see to be fact, to talk about attitude, technique, desire, and my thoughts from the dojo floor.

I hope you enjoy.