Andrew Evans said:
Dr. Barber,
Hello fellow doctorate holder!
Unfortunately, the two instructors I would like to host do not get along. I am very sure that they would take turns pointing out the flaws in the other's technique/methods. Hence, the term "interesting pairings" as most of these would never happen.
You're lucky. Once I visited another school and was asked to demonstrate a technique. The instructor interrupted and then showed the students how they do it better. When it was my turn, instead of moving to another technique, I went back to the subject and continued building on it. After all, it is easy to follow someone and make a total fool out of them.
Did the preceding presentations affect what you were planning to teach? If someone taught what you planned on teaching, how would you have adjusted?
I highly commend you for that! It shows a lot of humility and maturity.
Take care,
Andrew Evans, J.D.
Regards,
Andrew
Hello Dr. Evans,
Congratulations, though belated. One way out of the problem of having the pair at a seminar would be to put together a set of rules that each would have to abide by, if they accepted an invitation from you to participate in a seminar. Or have them appear seperately with the other giving a seminar at the same time on a different section of the floor, if your room were large enough. Divide the seminar participants into two groups with one group going to each instructor for a pre-determined period of time. For convience let's call it a morning and an afternoon session. Then the participants can switch and work with the other instructor for the second session. Since both instructors are working at the same time, they will not have a valid opportunity to be critical of the other person in real time and based on what they actually saw for themselves. If you avoid the side by side, one follows the other format, you avoid giving them opening to be critical of one another. You'll never know if that pairing would or would not actually happen until you ask them to do the seminar. I would suggest contacting each of them privately and explain what you would like to do and see what happens.
That was a rude thing for that fellow to do to you. It shows me that he was both small minded and insecure. After-all there are numerous ways that a technique can be modified or adapted. Some ways work better for an individual than some others. A good deal of the differences can be traced to an individuals size, strenght, weight, martial experience and preferences. Of course that fellow opened the door for you to take his example and build on it and I can't say that I would have acted differently than you did. After-all, he inivited you to demonstrate, he deserved to have his "better way" toyed with, teased and expanded upon... he set the ball in motion.
Yes and no with regard to the preceeding presentations. Each of the others had been heavily focused on the usage of the single stick. I had intended to use a double stick drill to set up my presentation, but with so much stick work preceeding my presentation, I dropped the stick work, put the double sinawali drill forward as an empty hand drill and then moved right into the empty hand self-defense applications with trapping included. I have been at a couple of other programs where my planned presentation was taught by someone else and I simply fell back on another set of ideas and techniques that allowed me to avoid copying the other fellows.
At a program in 2002, an instructor used the redonda and single sinawali drills as the focus of his 3 hour presentation and I really enjoyed his program. When I opened the morning session the next day, I used the flow/crossada drills and built my self-defense application off of those drills. I also added the pocket stick, kubaton keychain and Gunting Knife to my empty hand applications. My original plan was to teach from the redonda drill as my starting point.
Going to a seminar or camp program should be regarded as an opportunity to learn from others. It is also a chance to validate some of your ideas and movement against what you see others doing. Even if you do not discover something new, you might re-discover something that you already knew but hadn't used in a long time. There is some truth to the old, oft-used put-down, 'I've forgotten more than someone ever knew'.
Depending on how long you have been in the arts and how broad or narrow your training experiences it is entirely possible that there is some old stuff hanging out in the back of your mind because we tend to put new experiences first. We sometimes forget that the new stuff was built on the previous learning. Without the old stuff in place we would always be true beginners lacking in foundation, scope and breadth.
Perronally, I like multi instructor programs when they can and are augmented by the single instructor format. I enjoy the variety and different levels of intensity that the different instructors have as the teach. From the multi instructor programs, I have found individual instructors whom I gone on the work with over extended periods of time in large groups, small groups and some private or semi-private sessions. It all comes down to just how flexible and open different people are to learning. There simply isn't a single best way to teach or learn.
I hope that this information has answered your questions.
Jerome Barber, Ed.D.
