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For several semesters, I taught art history. At the first class meeting, I handed out the questions for the final exam and had the students create the 25 study cards that we were going to use for the semester. After many years of teaching, I found this methodology to work best.

From teaching and from my own classwork, I noticed that about six weeks after a course students could not remember most of the material that they had crammed for in preparing for tests. Thus, another method of teaching that I found useful was to reinforce the core principles over and over. For example, first you learn the names of the parts of speech. Then you learn to define them. Then, you learn to identify the part of speech of each word in a sentence. Then, you do exercises that combine each of the previous exercises.

In Tomiki Aikido, the first technique that you learn--shomen-ate--is the most advanced technique that you will ever learn. The first step is to learn where the most effective position is. The strongest attack against a two-legged human is a line of force perpendicular to a line drawn across the the toes (or heels, etc.) of a person. You learn to get there, which is not actually easy. Then you go there about 10,000 times. Basically, this is how aikido is learned, in my opinion.