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  • Teaching

    Dear everyone,

    What makes teaching great? What separetes a teaching from a salesman's promotional pitch or from an instruction manual? As an academician in training, I would love to be able to give lectures that aside from being informative really touch and brighten people's lives positively. The root of wisdom is in beneficial applications after all and not just shooting people with cold facts.

    It hit me that despite mankind's attempts to pass heritage and wisdom from one person to another, many attempts are plainly unsuccessful, deficient, or inadequate. I realized that teaching often fails because it doesn't connect from heart to heart. A heartless teaching is unmotivating or incapabale of demonstrating its supposed virtues, and at worst a highly sought teaching position might become a battle ground where egos and desires for unwarranted authority clash.

    In the so-called Information Age we are bombarded with facts and data that may have little meaning to good living. Accumulating information is typically a very consuming and fail-prone process because mere words inherently lack wisdom, unless that missing part is supplemented by a good student. Sheer information doesn't have a heart of its own, so its path from claiming something to helping a person realize good results can be a burdensome trek for an interested beginner of any art.

    Some meaning is always lost in translation. The case is especially true when translating essentially non-verbal arts and skills to verbal form. Here reader has the grave responsibility for patching partial information back to its full non-verbal function. Another way to put this is that the verbal information usually lacks the timing and spacing of effective teaching: a living teacher observes and acknowledges the situation of the student and adjusts his methods accordingly for the best benefit.

    It has been a great privilige to learn from Sifu, Sigung, and Sipak who all clearly possess the Heart of teaching. Finding a good teacher who consistently motivates and demonstrates the greatness of his or her art (martial or not) is a rare opportunity. Honor thy teachers!

    I would also like to offer a special thanks to all the instructors of Shaolin Wahnam Institute who have kindly taken on the responsibility of being excellent teachers with both joy and dedication.

    With sincere gratitude,
    Olli
    Last edited by understanding; 20 August 2017, 02:10 PM.
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