From the Classroom to the Mat: One Teacher’s Tools of the Trade

As a teacher, I’ve learned a thing or two along the way. Patience is your greatest asset. Having a sense of gravitas does not mean raising your voice. Your teaching experiences become ten times easier if you come into the classroom with a lesson plan that, despite all of the petty annoyances life chose to throw at you yesterday, you took the time to write down. You should be as excited to teach the same lesson for the tenth time as you were the first, and revel in how infectious your passion is when you see it reflected in your students. Every student is different and requires different accommodations based upon his or her skill set, but also that these differences should not serve as deterrents – and indeed should be looked upon as opportunities – for allowing them to achieve their very best under your tutelage. Having a sense of give is an instinct that you hone over the course of your career. You never stop improving your methods or looking at your subject material in novel ways. Mistakes should not be seen as failures, but as occasions for bettering yourself.

Having been a teacher at an all-boys Catholic high school in the Bronx for ten years and as a student at the Chinese Martial Arts Education Center for eight, some of these lessons have come more easily than others. However, they prove true in both cases, and I can say that at least half of what makes me the teacher I am today has come from what I have observed in the teaching methods of Sifu Tom McCusker. Every new move is an opportunity for discovery; every new form is a chance to improve upon one’s own skills. And in the teaching of the material handed down to me, I have found my own best practices: this student’s fine motor skills need improvement, so have her work section X of the form while praising her efforts and getting excited about her uncovering about a previously undisclosed martial application from it. That student has focusing issues: get him to do push-ups while remaining enthusiastic with the mutual understanding that doing so will make his mind and body stronger. Those students want to move ahead in their form; give them a new piece with the acknowledgment that they have to rep it a number of times and that corrections will need to be made…while making improvements on your own form in the process. In other words, your teaching methods improve as you do, all the while as you are seeking to better yourself.

1. B. Yeats once said that “[e]ducation is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” If you are able to infuse that same passion in the teaching of something as you are in the discovery of it, be it as an educator, a martial artist, or anything else, you will more than learn a thing or two: you will serve as a beacon for others, a torch from which they can light their own way.

by John Sudol