Thread: Vantage points
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Old 01-05-2013, 03:22 PM   #211
ChrisHein
 
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Re: Vantage points

Quote:
Dave de Vos wrote: View Post
I mean, if I'm a physics teacher with great didactical qualities, would you say I'm teaching Dave's system rather than physics?
This is a good point, and one that seems clear to me, but I don't think I'm making myself clear to others.

I'll use myself as an example. I teach Aikido, in the Aikido I teach, we spar and wrestle a lot. We do lot's of hard physical exercise. We beat on each other with weapons. These are all things that are very different than you would find in most Aikido schools. However, I say that I still teach Aikido, because the vast majority of what we do is Aikido. When my students encounter other Aikido folks, they share a very similar martial cultural background.

There are subtle distinctions, maybe eventually what I teach will be so different that my student's wouldn't understand what Aikido folk are talking about. At that point I would quit calling what I do Aikido. So I guess Dan is the only one who can answer this- Is what he teaches, so different that it is a unique thing, or is it that the majority of what Dan teaches is Daito ryu (or whatever system may be applicable) so that his students could pretty easily fit in at another Daito ryu school, or visa versa.

With your example of physics, if you teach formulas, and ways of doing math and understanding the physical universe that other students of physics couldn't understand/didnt' know I would say you're not teaching physics. If you just offer some innovative ideas, but the majority of what you are doing is understood by the physics community at large, then you are probably just doing physics.

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