Learn 7-17x faster with private lessons?

[Xue Sheng]

I do not nor have I ever trained Kenpo, I thought about it a few times but just never trained it nor is it likely I will so take my comment here anyway you like but this whole thing seems just a bit scary to me.

Speeding up training via private lessons… why? You cannot throw out numbers or even come up with rock solid equations as to how much faster you can make things happen because there is a BIG variable here.. the student.

Not all students learn at the same pace. You can give 7 private lessons a week and top that off with 2 hours a of group lessons and by the end of the year not all the students will be the same level. And some of them will be worse off than if you taught them at a slower pace.

This is to me like saying I have to drive 90 miles an hour because I am almost out of gas and I need to get to the gas station quicker… It just doesn’t work that way you still have cover the same amount of miles.

Could be I am a CMA guy and to me EVERYTHING take time… a lot of time in CMA. But I simply do not like it at all when people start talking about accelerated training in martial arts, things get missed and things end up watered down.

 

[Danjo]

I do not nor have I ever trained Kenpo, I thought about it a few times but just never trained it nor is it likely I will so take my comment here anyway you like but this whole thing seems just a bit scary to me.

Speeding up training via private lessons… why? You cannot throw out numbers or even come up with rock solid equations as to how much fast you can make things happen because there is a BIG variable here.. the student.

Not all students learn at the same pace. You can give 7 private lessons a week and top that off with 2 hours a of group lessons and by the end of the year not all the students will be the same level. And some of them will be worse off than if you taught them at a slower pace.

This is to me like saying I have to drive 90 miles an hour because I am almost out of gas and I need to get to the gas station quicker… It just doesn’t work that way you still have cover the same amount of miles.

Could be I am a CMA guy and to me EVERYTHING take time… a lot of time in CMA. But I simply do not like it at all when people start talking about accelerated training in martial arts, things get missed and things end up watered down.

You've pretty much nailed the whole problem here. It is the idea of speeding things up via private lessons. It just smacks of McDojoism. Why the rush? If privates are used to enhance training and get a bit more personal feedback etc. then great. But if they are used to "Speed things up" then it's bs and visions of assembly lines come into view. The whole point of this is why was the equation of 7-17x faster even a concern in the first place except to sell people on the idea that if they paid for privates, they would get a fast black belt?

 

[KenpoDave]

Actually, if you remove that assumption, then no one in the baseline model ever gets black because they never get instruction.

No, that is incorrect. In group only models, the ONLY instruction comes from the groups. In our model, it does not.

You can't call the baseline of group classes to be the equivelent of X numbers of private lessons, then only include private lessons in the comparison models.

Huh?!? That is what is being compared, the potential ablility to learn in private lessons compared to the average time it takes to learn in groups alone. "With private instruction, students can learn 7-17 times faster than with group classes alone."

That is fuzzy math at its finest, I have no problem with Al Tracy, we are a Tracy lineage school, we instruct through a similar model. I am only questioning the oddball math.

It's statistics. It is a comparison of potential vs. a stated average. You are missing the big picture here. Within the statement, there is an enormous IF. My first year in kenpo, I was in college. I was at the studio 4-5 hours a day until I started working there. Then, it was 40 hours a week. At the end of the first year, I had put nearly 2,000 hours into kenpo, and received less than 26 hours of instruction. I can't count groups as instruction time, even though I did 13 of them a week, because I led them all.

IF someone has that kind of time, and that kind of obsession, then the potential exists. Not everyone does. But that does not make the statement wrong.

IF someone puts in the time outside of instruction to get the stuff down, the potential is there. If they don't, the statement is not wrong.

 

[Flying Crane]

Relax. That last one was just me being a smartass.

alright then. sometimes it's hard to tell for sure.

 

[KenpoDave]

You've pretty much nailed the whole problem here. It is the idea of speeding things up via private lessons. It just smacks of McDojoism. Why the rush? If privates are used to enhance training and get a bit more personal feedback etc. then great. But if they are used to "Speed things up" then it's bs and visions of assembly lines come into view. The whole point of this is why was the equation of 7-17x faster even a concern in the first place except to sell people on the idea that if they paid for privates, they would get a fast black belt?

You're still not getting it. It's not about a faster black belt. It is about faster learning. I am trying really hard to make this understandable, and, unfortunately, I am now going to really confuse the issue...

Here goes...in Tracy's, the average time for someone to get a black belt is 3-5 years.

The kicker is, and this really is the crux of the matter, our teaching model allows the student to spend more time, much more time, working the material, and less time spent being instructed. In groups, you may get some specific attention, you may get none, but in a private, you get concentrated attention for 30 minutes.

 

[Xue Sheng]

You've pretty much nailed the whole problem here. It is the idea of speeding things up via private lessons. It just smacks of McDojoism. Why the rush? If privates are used to enhance training and get a bit more personal feedback etc. then great. But if they are used to "Speed things up" then it's bs and visions of assembly lines come into view. The whole point of this is why was the equation of 7-17x faster even a concern in the first place except to sell people on the idea that if they paid for privates, they would get a fast black belt?

I just don't see how anyone can put a number on training and say by X amount of time multiplied by X number of private lessons plus X number of group lessons you will be a black belt and not realize that this is not good for the student or the style.

It is good for a factory but not a martial art.

But then I am a CMA guy and we don't care about belts so :idunno:.

 

[Xue Sheng]

It's not about a faster black belt. It is about faster learning.

But isn't the goal here to get a Black belt faster?

 

[Danjo]

alright then. sometimes it's hard to tell for sure.

Peace.

 

[Flying Crane]

I'll weigh in here one final time and then I think I don't really have anything to add to the discussion.

I think private lessions have value, especially if the group sessions are large. Privates give the student a chance for some quality one-on-one time with the teacher where the material can be covered in explicit detail. Hopefully the student will gain a deeper understanding of the material because there is a concentrated focus which is not always possible with the distractions of a large group. In addition to gaining a deeper understanding, I suspect this can also speed up the pace at which a student can learn.

But keep in mind, learning is more intellectual, and it still takes time and work and practice before that intellectual knowledge becomes physical skill. In reality, there may not be any speeding up of that final process. Or there may be. It depends largely on the student.

I don't think the focus is on getting rank faster. It's just that the learning side can be done more quickly with privates, but rank is not given until the physical skills, along with the intellectual learning, merit the rank. If someone is using this idea to try and process people thru the ranks more quickly, without properly assessing merit, then that is a problem and represents an abuse of the method. I suspect there may be those among many orgs that do this, I don't think any org is free from shysters. It's sort of an unfortunate reality, when an org grows to a certain size, there will be a few bad apples in the group. Size itself can bring it's own problems with it. So keep that in perspective.

I don't like attaching solid numbers to these concepts. I don't think it's possible to actually measure the difference, and as Xue pointed out, the variable is the student himself and how well does he handle the entire learning process. Just putting a student thru a methodology is no guarantee that you will get predictable results after a certain period of time. And it leads to the misunderstanding that the idea is to process as many people as possible to black belt as quickly as possible, and that is not the point. I can certainly see how this can look to an outsider, and some of the points raised in this thread really don't surprise me.

Because of the student as variable, you really cannot measure the difference at all. The only way to do so accurately would be to teach a student using one methodology and see how quickly he progresses, then erase his memory and remove his skills, and teach him using another methodology, and compare. Obviously, this won't work. You cannot really compare two different students either, once again because of the variable nature of the student himself. But over time, you may begin to see general trends develop depending on which students take private lessons, and which do not. It's not scientific comparison, it's only anecdotal, but it may have merit and can support one position or the other.

So I don't like giving actual numbers to this kind of concept. Suffice it to say that under the right circumstances, private lessons can be very very helpful, and probably can accelerate a students development to a certain, unspecifiable degree. But it can be abused and misused and it can be misleading as well.

There's my two cents.

 

[Danjo]

I'll weigh in here one final time and then I think I don't really have anything to add to the discussion.

I think private lessions have value, especially if the group sessions are large. Privates give the student a chance for some quality one-on-one time with the teacher where the material can be covered in explicit detail. Hopefully the student will gain a deeper understanding of the material because there is a concentrated focus which is not always possible with the distractions of a large group. In addition to gaining a deeper understanding, I suspect this can also speed up the pace at which a student can learn.

But keep in mind, learning is more intellectual, and it still takes time and work and practice before that intellectual knowledge becomes physical skill. In reality, there may not be any speeding up of that final process. Or there may be. It depends largely on the student.

I don't think the focus is on getting rank faster. It's just that the learning side can be done more quickly with privates, but rank is not given until the physical skills, along with the intellectual learning, merit the rank. If someone is using this idea to try and process people thru the ranks more quickly, without properly assessing merit, then that is a problem and represents an abuse of the method. I suspect there may be those among many orgs that do this, I don't think any org is free from shysters. It's sort of an unfortunate reality, when an org grows to a certain size, there will be a few bad apples in the group. Size itself can bring it's own problems with it. So keep that in perspective.

I don't like attaching solid numbers to these concepts. I don't think it's possible to actually measure the difference, and as Xue pointed out, the variable is the student himself and how well does he handle the entire learning process. Just putting a student thru a methodology is no guarantee that you will get predictable results after a certain period of time. And it leads to the misunderstanding that the idea is to process as many people as possible to black belt as quickly as possible, and that is not the point. I can certainly see how this can look to an outsider, and some of the points raised in this thread really don't surprise me.

Because of the student as variable, you really cannot measure the difference at all. The only way to do so accurately would be to teach a student using one methodology and see how quickly he progresses, then erase his memory and remove his skills, and teach him using another methodology, and compare. Obviously, this won't work. You cannot really compare two different students either, once again because of the variable nature of the student himself. But over time, you may begin to see general trends develop depending on which students take private lessons, and which do not. It's not scientific comparison, it's only anecdotal, but it may have merit and can support one position or the other.

So I don't like giving actual numbers to this kind of concept. Suffice it to say that under the right circumstances, private lessons can be very very helpful, and probably can accelerate a students development to a certain, unspecifiable degree. But it can be abused and misused and it can be misleading as well.

There's my two cents.

Wow. That's a lot for two cents! LOL.

I agree with what you wrote here.

 

[Flying Crane]

Wow. That's a lot for two cents! LOL.

I agree with what you wrote here.

i'm having a fire sale.

 

[Xue Sheng]

I'll weigh in here one final time and then I think I don't really have anything to add to the discussion.

I think private lessions have value, especially if the group sessions are large. Privates give the student a chance for some quality one-on-one time with the teacher where the material can be covered in explicit detail. Hopefully the student will gain a deeper understanding of the material because there is a concentrated focus which is not always possible with the distractions of a large group. In addition to gaining a deeper understanding, I suspect this can also speed up the pace at which a student can learn.

But keep in mind, learning is more intellectual, and it still takes time and work and practice before that intellectual knowledge becomes physical skill. In reality, there may not be any speeding up of that final process. Or there may be. It depends largely on the student.

I don't think the focus is on getting rank faster. It's just that the learning side can be done more quickly with privates, but rank is not given until the physical skills, along with the intellectual learning, merit the rank. If someone is using this idea to try and process people thru the ranks more quickly, without properly assessing merit, then that is a problem and represents an abuse of the method. I suspect there may be those among many orgs that do this, I don't think any org is free from shysters. It's sort of an unfortunate reality, when an org grows to a certain size, there will be a few bad apples in the group. Size itself can bring it's own problems with it. So keep that in perspective.

I don't like attaching solid numbers to these concepts. I don't think it's possible to actually measure the difference, and as Xue pointed out, the variable is the student himself and how well does he handle the entire learning process. Just putting a student thru a methodology is no guarantee that you will get predictable results after a certain period of time. And it leads to the misunderstanding that the idea is to process as many people as possible to black belt as quickly as possible, and that is not the point. I can certainly see how this can look to an outsider, and some of the points raised in this thread really don't surprise me.

Because of the student as variable, you really cannot measure the difference at all. The only way to do so accurately would be to teach a student using one methodology and see how quickly he progresses, then erase his memory and remove his skills, and teach him using another methodology, and compare. Obviously, this won't work. You cannot really compare two different students either, once again because of the variable nature of the student himself. But over time, you may begin to see general trends develop depending on which students take private lessons, and which do not. It's not scientific comparison, it's only anecdotal, but it may have merit and can support one position or the other.

So I don't like giving actual numbers to this kind of concept. Suffice it to say that under the right circumstances, private lessons can be very very helpful, and probably can accelerate a students development to a certain, unspecifiable degree. But it can be abused and misused and it can be misleading as well.

There's my two cents.

I too agree

 

[Blindside]

Huh?!? That is what is being compared, the potential ablility to learn in private lessons compared to the average time it takes to learn in groups alone.

A group class does not constitute all instruction time, as your comparison assumes, and that huge assumption is the source of the number difference. Obviously those who teach through the group model don't spend all their time in instruction, much of it is in drills or other methods of reviewing or practicing what is given in instruction. Lets say that in the average one hour group class an individual gets 5 minutes of instruction time, and the rest of the time is spend working the material. Two group classes per week and that person is getting 10 minutes of actual instruction and 110 minutes of working/practicing/drilling. The one private, two group model student is getting 30 minutes of instruction and 120 minutes of working/practicing/drilling. So again the comparison in time of instruction does not come out to 6x and certainly not 17x, it is more like 3x. If that student doesn't learn faster there is something wrong, he is getting more instruction and is training more often.

Lamont

 

[KenpoDave]

But isn't the goal here to get a Black belt faster?

No. The goal is to allow each student the freedom to learn and progress at the rate that suits them the best.


The assumption on this entire thread seems to be that the statement somehow implies that students learning under this instructional model learn 7-17 times faster. It is a potential. The model allows for students to progress at their own rates, and face it, there are some people out there that have abilities that make the rest of us drool.

 

[KenpoDave]

Lets say that in the average one hour group class an individual gets 5 minutes of instruction time, and the rest of the time is spend working the material.

Sigh.

Never mind.

 

[KenpoDave]

From what I read, you said that most make black in 3 years, which amounts to 156 private half hour lessons. The way I am reading that is in 78 total hours of instruction, someone can achieve a black belt level of competency. If that's the ONLY time a student puts into it, I frankly don't see how that's possible.

In my experience, it is not. In my system, IF THE ONLY time a student puts into it is a private and two groups a week, getting a black belt is not really possible at all.

 

[Carol]

Lets be fair though.

If the Tracys had said "Learn Faster With Private Lessons" and not quantified their statement with a number that sets expectations for how fast one can learn....then someone could take issue with that as well "They just say its faster. They don't say how much faster. If a student learns 90 days worth of material in 88 days, that's still faster."

 

[KenpoDave]

Lets be fair though.

If the Tracys had said "Learn Faster With Private Lessons" and not quantified their statement with a number that sets expectations for how fast one can learn....then someone could take issue with that as well "They just say its faster. They don't say how much faster. If a student learns 90 days worth of material in 88 days, that's still faster."

Yes, that is true. But Al Tracy doesn't throw numbers around randomly. And there is still that important word in the statement that everyone keeps skipping over in their assumptions...CAN.

I've used the model. It works. The numbers are right. Let me leave it at this:

• On average, it takes a person 3-5 years to obtain a black belt in a martial art.
• "With private lessons, students can learn 7-17 times faster than with groups alone."
• In Tracy's, it takes an average of 3-5 years to get a black belt.

Contrary to popular assumption, this DOES NOT mean that we are turning out black belts 7-17 times faster than everyone else. If you really want to understand, give it a try.

 

[Xue Sheng]

Yes, that is true. But Al Tracy doesn't throw numbers around randomly. And there is still that important word in the statement that everyone keeps skipping over in their assumptions...CAN.

I've used the model. It works. The numbers are right. Let me leave it at this:

• On average, it takes a person 3-5 years to obtain a black belt in a martial art.
• "With private lessons, students can learn 7-17 times faster than with groups alone."
• In Tracy's, it takes an average of 3-5 years to get a black belt.

Contrary to popular assumption, this DOES NOT mean that we are turning out black belts 7-17 times faster than everyone else. If you really want to understand, give it a try.

Forgive me for asking this if this has already been covered;

But if the assumption is that students “learn” 7 to 17 times faster and they are not advanced any faster then what is the purpose of this?

Also is this required the private lesson part that is?

And if it is required does it now cost the student more money that it would of before with just group lessons?

And if it is not required are students that take group lessons and only group lessons given the same opportunity and consideration when it comes to promotion?

 

[Danjo]

But if the assumption is that students “learn” 7 to 17 times faster and they are not advanced any faster then what is the purpose of this?

Bingo.