Your Students Should Be Beating You

I was at a tournament earlier this year where I heard one of the most baffling things of my entire fencing career. “None of the instructors are competing because they’d absolutely wipe the floor with all of the students.” Unfortunately the idea of the instructor being top dog is something I’ve seen time and time again in martial arts spaces.

I’d like to advocate for a different approach.

In his brilliant essay What is a maestro? Puck Curtis talks about how the hottest sticks tend to be the younger up and coming provosts who are primarily focused on their own game as opposed to maestri who spend most of their time teaching.

Now inherently the people who become maestri are going to have themselves been top students. As such they are going to have mid performing students who don’t put in the same kinds of hours each week and as a result won’t be able to beat their instructors. That said, if the top rank of students aren’t able to go toe to toe with their teacher, then something probably isn’t going right.

If it took me ten years to get to a certain place in my fight, my students should be able to get there in eight and their students should be able to get there in seven. Our role as instructors is not to replicate our own learning experiences, but instead add to them such that our students progress faster than we ever did. If each generation takes the same amount of time to learn something, then that lineage’s instructors aren’t adding anything to the art, they’re just parroting what the person before them did.

Not all of your students will beat you all of the time. But if someone puts in the same kinds of hours you do, they should be taking you down more often than not. As well, them beating you shouldn’t serve as a challenge to your authority, it should be a moment of pride for everything you’ve done. Thankfully I have had fencing teachers who have always wanted me to beat them. They might not have made it easy to do so, but ultimately they were there to see their students succeed.

In other news, I’ll be doing the photoshoot for my book, “Bolognese Longsword: For the Modern Practitioner” this weekend. Once that’s done I just have to line up all the image files with the text and then send it out to my layout person. I cannot overstate how excited I am to be getting close to the finish line on this.

A reminder that I’ve also got two workshops coming up. First, I’m doing a full day Bolognese longsword intensive at the Longsword Symposium just outside of St. Louis on Saturday, November 9th. https://www.facebook.com/events/442306731738275

As well, I’ll also be teaching my class “Finding Your Area of Excellence for Longsword”, which will be an even more in depth exploration of what I talked about in this article, at Tempered Mettle Historical Fencing’s inaugural event Indes-Cember on Saturday, December 7th in Champaign, IL. https://www.temperedmettlehistoricalfencing.com/events/