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Old 11-07-2005, 02:55 PM   #8
MaryKaye
Dojo: Seattle Ki Society
Location: Seattle
Join Date: Dec 2003
Posts: 522
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Re: Poll: How deficient is your instructor's abilities in teaching aikido to you?

Strange question.

My teachers come from various backgrounds; the ones with formal training in teaching Aikido certainly have a larger repetoire of tricks and techniques to get things across, and seem to find teaching easier. There are a few items--the "faceplant ukemi" comes to mind--where none of them have a teaching technique and they feel at a loss if asked to teach it rather than just demonstrate it. (This ukemi tends to be learned by observation of the senior students instead.) I guess those are "deficiencies" but there is so much to aikido that it seems unlikely anyone has fully developed strategies to teach every single bit.

I was remarkably slow to learn to forward roll, and my teachers diligently researched new ways to teach this skill--most of which didn't work, but I appreciated the amount of effort that went into it. I think that learning new tools when the old ones don't work is as much as could be asked of a teacher, and I'm proud of mine for doing so.

I have met people from whom I found it difficult to learn, but unless all of their students had that experience, I would tend to call that a student/teacher mismatch, not a deficiency. Expecting any teacher to be great for *all* students is, in my opinion, unrealistic.

Mary Kaye
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