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Hello again. In class tonight we were having a bit of fun with some tanto techniques, and a situation came up that was both fun and informative, but perhaps ill conceived. We have a student who is relatively new and a genuinely nice guy who is also a Marine. He's been out for five years, but he still has "it" in him as I'm sure he always will. When we were doing one of the techniques he reverted to his previous knowledge of knifework and he kept changing up the attack. It was supposed to be something like an upward scoop from the hip into the lower abdomen, like maybe something that a person who didn't really know how to use a knife might do, but he wanted to do all sorts of other things. Ok, I think we all know that he knows how to use a knife, but it wasn't the time or place to show us his skills. Not to mention that when our instructor came over to try out some of the other attacks, he decided to give the instructor a hard time and really fight everything that the instructor wanted to try. Now, I'm not saying that it's never appropriate to try things out, or to test someone's technique with some resistance, but this was a lot of resistance. He even manages to scratch the instructor's hand once, drawing blood. Here's the thing, our instructor didn't mind at all, in fact he was having fun with it and was trying to learn how to switch up his technique based on what the uke was doing. It wasn't a bad exercise, and it was sure fun to watch, but it ended up looking a bit more like wrestling at times. Another student and I stayed after class to talk with the uke, and he basically said that the reason he did all that was that: A) he didn't really know that it wasn't appropriate and B) He wasn't sure what the attack and technique were supposed to be, so he reverted to something else that he knew. He said he understood why that technique does what it does now, but only after he tested it. I tried to say that when I was new, I had to trust that the Founder and my Sempai and Teacher knew a lot more than I did, and there are reasons that these things are the ways that they are. Even if we don't understand why untill later. I would wonder why it was that something was a certain way, thinking that it felt unnatural or weird or at least not effective, but sometime later I would understand it. If we all tested every single technique all the time it would be hard to learn much. On the other hand, maybe if you wonder about something you should wait untill class is over and then work on it with someone... I don't know, it wasn't nearly as dramatic as I made it sound, but I can't help but think that if our instructor was a bit less relaxed that some bad things may have come out of it.
05-15-2003 09:42 PM 