WHAT BLACK BELTS NEED TO KNOW

WE LEARN IN LAYERS OF UNDERSTANDING

Sensei Alan Says: We learn in layers of understanding.

All students need tremendous amounts of repetition in order to achieve technical excellence. This is true for all types of learning - mental, emotional, and spiritual - as well as physical. It is through repetition that we build up - "muscle memory," i.e. the ability to be able to do a technique or movement automatically - without thought.

Once we really "know" something, we know it without thought.... we know it as a feeling. Which frees up our mind to explore that subject more deeply. Hence we are able to find "new" information in previously learned material.

However, for this to happen we first have to work through what we don't know, which basically means - we have to make some mistakes, in order to discover what we learned.

That's what makes learning such a marvelously curious experience.

The clever teacher uses various approaches and types of training to encourage the student to develop basic skill sets that will lead to successful outcomes. Since repetition can be boring, the ingenuity of the teacher is in finding more and varied ways to get the student to discover "how" to learn the material. The teacher's ultimate goal is to get enough repetitions (i.e., quantity of work performed), to allow the student to discern the difference between poor, fair, good, and excellence in their work.


What the teacher hopes is that the student will discover that a lot of well focused quantity will eventually produce a little bit of quality.... especially at the beginning. As the learner continues to do lots of stuff "wrong" (which comes out in the repetition), they hopefully will "learn" to drop the wrong and stick to the "right." The theory being that the student develops the ability to be right more often than wrong. And that's where growth occurs.

This scenario of learning is repeated over and over again at different skills levels in the student's development. What the Yellow Belt learns about kicks, for example, is learned over again at the Green Belt level, but with greater awareness and depth of understanding. This is why it's important to return to fundamentals - at all levels.