Keeping It Short and Sweet

Something I’ve noticed in my teaching lately is that my lessons have gradually gotten shorter. Unlike the standard dojo model with the one teacher at the top and ten or twelve students following along, SCA practices are primarily a series of private lessons mixed in with sparring sessions.

One of the educational models that was treated as the norm when I started out is often referred to as the “drinking from the firehose method”. The idea with this was that you’d find someone knowledgeable and they’d give you everything they knew all at once. The idea here is that even though you won’t absorb the whole lesson at once, some part of it is inherently going to stick and next time you’ll show up and have a different part of it stick. Repeat ad nauseum until the whole file transfers over and you now get to teach the next generation.

I do not like this way of teaching.

Sure, there are of course going to be people who make it through and are able to succeed while learning this way, but I just don’t think it works for 90% of people. It results in people feeling overloaded and doesn’t come with much sense of accomplishment as you go along. Every once in awhile something might click and you’ll feel good about it, but those aren’t going to come up week in and week out.

As I’ve progressed in my teaching, I have instead found myself giving shorter and shorter, more and more focused, lessons. Instead of trying to cover everything at once I’ll cover one, maybe two things, and spend at max 20 minutes working through them. After that point I find that we’re really just doing reps. Reps are great, but you don’t necessarily need a knowledgeable coach to do them with you once you’ve started to get the hang of things.

This way each person I work with gets to feel like they made progress there and then without necessarily feeling overwhelmed by the enormity that is the corpus of fencing technique. At the same time, I’m able to make time to work with multiple people throughout a two hour practice, plus take some time to just work on my own technique so that I myself don’t burn out.

Hopefully this helps you structure your own practice a bit better.

In other news, I’ve got a whole lot of classes/workshops coming up that I’d love to have you at.

May 18th I’ll be teaching at CADD (Constellation Academy of Defense & Dance) teaching once class on helping you choose which manual to go with and another on how to build any drill. https://sites.google.com/view/cadd-2024/home

May 25-26th I’ll be teaching at VISS (Vancouver International Swordplay Symposium) with one class going over Giganti’s feints and another helping longsword fighters find their area of excellence. https://www.vancouverswordplay.com/registration/

Finally I’ll be leading a day long workshop on Giganti’s rapier just south of Akron, OH on June 22nd. https://www.facebook.com/events/965422374828012?ref=newsfeed

Finally I just sent my book after to my layout person a few days ago, so hopefully I’ll have pre-orders up and running soon.