on teaching/learning...

Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down. ~Ray Bradbury


I'm not really a fan of uncalculated risks. A calculated risk means analyzing yourself, sizing up your competition, and calculating your odds. If you really want it, you'll get it, and the odds will be in your favor because you've worked hard to get them in your favor. Learning by doing. Having faith. Having the right intention. A willingness to be wrong, so you can get it right. Realizing that the learning never stops. Realizing that there is more than one way to achieve a goal.
It's been a really big challenge being schooled in one way of training gymnastics and, because I was young and naive, commiting to the idea that "this way is the best and only way" only to learn that there are many, many "ways" of doing something. Coaching gymnast is the communist countres where children are basically all brought up the same way and ahve no choice whether or not to be a gymnast presents an entirely new host of challenges. The challenges here in America are that parents have many different methods of disciplining and rewarding their children. This makes some children weak and others strong; mentally physically and spirtually.

And I have to find my own way of being in the midst of all of those different ways of being.

A cast handstand on bars is "finished" when a girl goes from a front support on the bar to a handstand position on the bar. Ideally, she ends up with a completely straight body, completely in control, able to go either forwards or backwards because she is strong/flexible enough to decide, not because she is out of control or relying on sheer momentum to get her up there. She knows exactly where she is at all times during the skill. She is there with it and completely prepared, after hours of mental, physical, and spiritual training, to hit a perfect handstand.

I'm using a cast handstand as an example of a goal, a destination, because in gymnastics, the mentality is "straight line." The mentality of the straight line. It's not only a physical thing. It's a mental and spiritual thing, too. Actually, if you can understand the mental and spiritual side of any movement or movement discipline then the physical part is very easy.

This is what I think about learning....

If you watch how a creature moves, you will gain insight into how it thinks and what it believes.
If you learn how a creature processes information, then you will gain insight into what it believes and how it moves.
If you figure out what a creature believes, then you will gain insight into how it moves and how it thinks.

And the three put together make a person/creature. If you can figure out all three, then you can teach whatever it is you want to teach. This goes for teaching others as well as teaching yourself.