I’m not an MA teacher; I’m an academic (science) and physical education teacher, so keep that in mind...
There’s going to be differences at where kids and adults should be at this stage. And there’s a good variation within each group (5 year old vs 10, etc.). Physical abilities and hinderances/disabilities also play an obvious and realistic role.
Kids - they pick up gross movements quicker, but generally take significantly longer to get the finer details right. Details like hands up and/or not too close or far out from their body, looking at the target, keeping the strikes at the appropriate target instead of off somewhere else, making a proper fist, etc. Take a roundhouse kick - kids will throw that kick better in a lot of ways than an adult initially, from just watching the kicking leg standpoint. But everything else will take quite some time. Look at basics - they need reminders to use two hands, rechamber, and end the block in the proper place way more than adults do. That’s what I mean by the details vs the gross movement.
Adults typically take longer to figure out the gross movement. I think they’re thinking about all those details and trying to get them all right at the same time. They’re far more cerebral about it. But once they’ve relatively got it, they need far less reminders and prompts about those details than kids do. The teacher typically sounds like a broken record with the kids’ prompts and corrections vs with the adults.
At the 2-4 month range, both groups students should be out of that exponential learning curve and tapering off, but they’re still improving at a decent rate. The techniques should look fine, but still needs obvious polishing. The student is conscientious of what mistakes he/she’s personally making and you should see them genuinely trying to correct them. You see the frustration of knowing exactly what it’s supposed to look like but still can’t do it 100%. Basically at this point, they know more than they can actually do. And the technique is far more performance than functional.
Just what I’ve seen.
