How many teachers out there have material that they give only to some students...or continue to teach individually in a standardized system. Afterall we teach a style and we teach indivdual people, where doi we balance this? this was brought up by sk101 in anohter thread and i thought it might desreve a discussion of its own.
respectfully,
Marlon
Depends on the perspective you've chosen to teach from. I have a set minimum standard everyone must achieve, those who are exceptional excel to more difficult material at a more efficient pace.
SL4 has a very high minimum standard of execution - which is why not just anybody gets accepted to train there. Doc picks and chooses (as is the right of any head of a school, really) his students because what he teaches isn't for everyone. (It could be used by everyone, but it requires a real deep gut check and examination of what you think you already know. Not everyone will do that.)
I'm not quite as strict as Doc is, but then again teaching out of my back yard and my garage I don't have to worry about any overhead whatsoever, so I have literally as much time as someone wants to spend till they meet my standards. I have one middle aged woman who started when she was 48, it took her a year to get to her first promotion, and another six months for her next...but things are starting to click for her and it's now physically evident in how she moves.
I won't compromise the minimum standard levels - I've seen way too many people "tailor" themselves and their students right out of the principles and concepts they're trying to utilize. Everything is designed to teach or reinforce some particular concept or principle. There are built in redundancies into the training setup for just about all systems to account for approaches that just don't make sense to some people. That doesn't mean you don't teach X to person Y because they don't get it. It means you need to approach X from multiple scenarios and training structures to ensure they understand the underlying principles and concepts. There's a huge difference between tailoring the material to fit the student, and tailoring the teaching approach to the same concepts. The first is more often than not bass ackwards, and introduces scenarios where we've all seen people wail away in the air, and you ask them what that was for, and they say well, it was X, Y, Z....so they made up something that looks really cool in the air, and then tried to fit an attack to the defense. Doc clued me in a while back to a far better strategy - define the attack - then teach the principles and methods to deal with that attack. That way you'll build the mental and physical responses that can deal with attack X and variations X1, X2, and X3.
Human anatomy isn't really that different from person to person, and in the end - compliance to human anatomy works every time - pain compliance and simplistic pressure points are contingent upon everyone's tolerance levels.
So ... the simple answer to the question I've got is - I teach everyone the same material - but certain students require different approaches to learning the concepts and principles contained therein.
