To Be A Great Student
Get More F's
Success in school is built on “getting the right answer” and “working independently” while life success is built on gaining experience, cooperation and collaboration. There are many ways that conventional education is at odds with “real world” success, so it's no surprise that we who have the advantage of a modern education must also overcome its disadvantages.
It may have been years or decades since you were a student in school, but when you first enter the dojo you are a student once again. It's a great time to re-evaluate what the learning process should really be like. In educational psychology this is called metalearning. Before you attempt to learn you might want to consider how you're going to learn. People can spend years or decades fumbling over the same terrain without making much progress. They continue to beat on the subject with the same old rusty hammer year after year. These are the people you see every year at seminars who still seem to be doing not much better than they were the year before.
We all grew up knowing that the letter F has negative connotations from the classroom to the playground. Nobody wants an “F” on a test and nobody wants to be “F'd” up at recess. So what better way to guide our excursion into martial arts education than to redeem this beleaguered letter with The Six F's of being a great student.
1. Forget
Take one sophomoric pupil, a teacup and a cheeky zen master holding a boiling pot of fresh tea and you have the ingredients of a parable that's recited in every martial art dojo in the world. We all believe we have an empty cup, that is unless we have information or experience either in support of or to the contrary in which case we are obliged to be forthcoming with that knowledge if the opportunity should present itself. Exactly.
One of the common words heard from new students is “like.” I'm not referring to the “like” from the Valley Girl Lexicon of Southern California. I mean “like” as in “Ohhhh, I understand. This is just like swinging a golf club here!” Teachers will often use similes to help students on the climb, but in the hands of the student they can be hazardous. The teacher knows (or should know) how to be careful that the rope they are using to help the student up the precipice isn't later used by the same student to hang themselves.
The opposite of “like” is “different” and the usage of the two terms may be a dead heat. We sometimes hear a beginning student say, “Ohhhhh. This is different from how we do it.” A self-respecting teacher might think, “We? Who's we? Since you're in this dojo then we is us now! The words "like" and “different” reveal a mind grasping to retain control when confronted with new and unfamiliar territory. However helpful they might seem, they create a lens that distorts new information and experiences and serve to distance us from directly embracing the object of our study.
2. Format
When I took microbiology in doctor school there were scads of bacteria to memorize each with its own special properties: prokaryote, eukaryotes, ciliated, flagellated, aerobic, anaerobic, Gram stain. Studying this material turned my brain to chowder pretty fast. I knew there was no way I could just memorize a chart of dozens of bacteria each with numerous properties, so I made a little cartoon of each bacterium with my multicolored ball point pen including all of its unique features like a happy face for gram positive, sad for gram negative, a long whip like flagella tail or a cute little cilia buzz cut. At test time remembering the properties of Salmonella, Staph aureus or E. Coli was simply a matter of picturing the cartoon in the margin of my notes.
It turns out that our brains are not in the least bit inclined to remembering tables full of raw data or memorizing a complex series of physical movements like aikido techniques. So when you're learning something you've got to survey the material and consider the best way to format it for learning and recall. Find a way to bring the material to life for yourself. A teacher may or may not be like a mother bird and present the material in predigested form. It's your job as a good student to figure out how to chew it up and digest it in a way that works for you.
How we format is really a unique function of how our individual mind works. In the musical “Cats” it's said that cats have three names, the name their owner calls them by, the name that cats call each other and the secret name that each cat only knows themselves and which they silently ponder for hours on end. We all call techniques by certain common names by which anyone inside our outside the art could identify them. As aikidoka we also communicate these techniques with each other in the form of practice. But beyond this, there is an understanding which only you can possess. This is the most personal and inexpressible art, formatted at the deepest level, which only you can ponder.
3. Feel
Children are feeling creatures. Long before we can cobble our words into sentences we quietly go about the work of learning how to maneuver our body and manipulate our surroundings in what has to be the steepest learning curve of our whole life. A lot of this early learning is the result of tireless amoebic experimentation, bumping from one dead end to another until by shear attrition we arrive at a solution. Our second leg finds its way over the edge of the crib and voila, dangling on the outside of the rail we find our fate is held in our own little chubby fingers.
As our verbal skills grow we rely increasingly on words to connect to and control the world around us. Language becomes the great tool of the intellect. We can easily forget the power of direct apprehension that we all shared prior to our reliance on written and audible symbols. Foreign language teachers know that students learn better when they are immersed in the new language and resist the urge to translate everything back to their native tongue. When you learn something new in aikido you should try to get to the “feeling” of the technique as quickly as possible. When you're observing watch the teacher and try to vicariously feel and experience his or her technique as directly as you can. When you get into your car and drive you don't consciously think every single action required to do it. The entire process is a succession of feelings that operate without the need for conscious intervention. This is the level of automatic activity you want to engage as quickly as possible in your aikido practice.
When I needed to recall the identity and properties of dozens of bacteria I had to create a special and somewhat exaggerated feeling for each microbe. Strong emotional content is a powerful learning aid. The most deeply embedded and powerful memories we have are those laced with the most intense feeling and emotion. Remaining acutely mentally engaged in your practice by exercising your imagination and putting your heart into each and every movement will embed that practice deeply into your nervous system in a way that no amount of verbiage could ever do. The reason that various koryu of Japan place such importance on the unbroken succession of masters no doubt lies in the fact that the complex panoply of sensory information embodied in the ryu cannot be duplicated from writings or even movies.
4. Fail
Up to this point you've agreed to empty your cup and forget about what you might already know. You've started to actively participate in taking the material you've been presented with formatting it in such a way that you can digest it. You've watched the sensei carefully and have vicariously experienced the technique for yourself. There is only one thing left to do. You must commence with your own endless series of failures, each of varying degree.
The greatest artists, after completing their greatest works, invariably say that they could have done better. If you are harboring some notion that a technique will simply fall into place for you, you are working under a delusion that will ultimately disappoint you. Everyone is failing. The master is simply failing at a higher level. Everyone, from novice to master, must make a continual effort to put the pieces together. The difference is that the master has a more well defined notion of what needs to be fixed long before it becomes a problem. Ultimately, the only thing you have in your art is your own experience and mastery is the product of education through failure. You must abandon any notion you have of “getting the right answer.”
5. Figure it out
It is not until you've failed, grandly and courageously, that you have fully obtained the requisite materials for mastery. The thing to “figure out” here is your own series of experiments and failures. You must observe your own practice as it is happening, as though from a distance. You cannot dismount the horse in order to see where your riding has gone awry. Being an active and yet passive observer of your own practice is akin to a singer being a good listener. The pitch is constantly threatening to veer off course. Even the best singers are continually out of tune and it's only the ceaselessly vigilant ear that brings them back toward the target.
Figuring it out is not about finding the right words. You've got to learn to speak the native language of your art in the way that mathematicians communicate on a chalk board through symbols for which any verbal translation will consistently fall short.
6. Flow
In practice, the process of forgetting, formatting, feeling, failing and figuring it out can all happen in a continuous and flowing manner. This is keiko, the continuous flow of passing again and again through the same place, but with a spirit that grows and deepens with each return. There isn't a single moment where you've “got it” so don't bother getting stuck in your practice by getting stuck in your head.
Your growth is like that of a tree, weathered by adversity, but stronger and more beautiful because of it. This is the beauty of wabi, of simplicity and natural refinement. The goal is not to resist or even avoid the adversities of practice, but to accept them and become one with them so that they no longer chafe. This is how the spirit is polished.
Philip Greenwood, Sensei
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