Obstacles to Teaching in SCA Rapier

Teaching sucks.

From elementary school through high school, most people are taught to be receptacles for wisdom from on high. This is an effective approach for mathematical and scientific concepts. In the maths and the sciences, there are Correct and Incorrect answers. Such luxuries, these things are.

I sat on this post for a while after writing it, because I am not a super-experienced teacher and in this post I disagree with many things that we do in the Society. However, it is only through being wrong over and over again that I will eventually come to correct beliefs. So fuck it, let's proceed with this post.

*****

Our Art is a difficult one. There are multiple, incompatible influences competing for attention. For a beginner, it is Far Too Much to process. There is no "one way" to fence, and this makes life extremely difficult. No wonder the Black Tigers have found so much success in our Art - they provide a direct path to improve, and then provide an empirical-ish path for advancement beyond amateur level.

For the rest of us, there is not really a direct path for advancement. There are, however, several recurring shapes of education. I recount them here, from "best" to "worst".

• Direct Dependent
• This is what happens when a teacher takes a cadet. They gain a single source of truth, which is super useful. This can be anti-useful when a teacher's experiences significantly differ from the student's in subtle ways, such as having and being unaware of differences in physical limitations.
• Study Group
• A group of people, with no real hierarchy to themselves, gather and talk swords. Sometimes there are people who are more experienced or louder, and minor hierarchy forms, but in general everybody learns from each other at least to some degree. This is only useful in smaller groups, so everybody can work with each other and learn from each other. This breaks down if someone is both loud and disagrees with most other people in the group.
• Class
• One teacher, many students. Generally, the teacher and students both assume that the teacher is saying things which are capital-t True. If this assumption breaks down, the class bogs down in "but what if..." discussions. The education must be structured in a way that makes sense. Inevitably, this means that some things will be left out, or at least left until the future. This has many of the same problems as Direct Dependent relationships, except on a larger scale.
• Self-Directed Learning
• This is the default learning strategy, and happens to be my favorite. In order to gain anything at all from it, the individual must have a strong sense of meta-knowledge. That is to say, they must have strategies to determine if the things they learn are actually true. Every theory must be obsessively tested. This strategy has the greatest likelihood of leading into folly and incorrectness.
• Drive-By Teaching
• This is what happens after someone asks, "did you notice anything in that set of passes?", and then their opponent answers that they did. This is the lowest form of teaching, with the worst signal-to-noise ratio. It is also the most common form of teaching for new fencers, in our organization.

All of these methods of teaching have advantages and disadvantages. In particular, only study groups and self-directed learning encourage people to establish meta-knowledge. At the same time, classes, study groups, and direct dependent relationships allow a consistent thread of teaching. This is super useful. 

Using the Black Tigers as an example again, they do a number of effective things to imbue people with knowledge quickly.

1. They set people up with a mentor, who will watch video of the student and give advice. (Direct Dependent)
2. At larger events, they meet up and work together. (Study Group)
3. The bigger-name Tigers teach at larger events. (Classes)
4. They have a ranking system, which rewards better tournament-performance. (A specific meta-knowledge strategy.)
5. They apparently have manuals for teaching about how to fight. (Theoretical basis for techniques, individual techniques)

I disagree with many parts of how the Tigers, as a loose organization, do things. But they are way, way better than the currently-existing nothing, for going from a novice to an effective fencer.

Part of the reason I've been thinking about them has been another, looser collection of "fencing school" I've come into contact with recently. The way of fighting used by the Super Ansteorran Murder Brothers. This has many of the same elements of the Black Tigers, even down to having a similar, blade-low and dagger-forward stance. As far as I can tell, they don't really have a meta-knowledge strategy or any teaching materials other than word-of-mouth and video, but the rest is relatively similar.

It's interesting. It's a vast departure from where I originally intended this post to go, but it's interesting and bears keeping-in-mind for future analysis.

*****

The thing I wanted to write about, here, was why drive-by teaching is so terrible.

For learning, there are three kinds of knowledge.

1. Knowledge of what to do (techniques)
2. Knowledge of underlying theories (theories)
3. Knowledge of how to discern if the above things are correct (meta-knowledge)

Generally, the first and second types of knowledge can be learned from other people. But the third kind of knowledge is even more of a foundation than the first two types, and tends to be something that people don't even know to learn. It's not truly necessary to learn it in order to fence well, but if you don't have it then you can't perform your own research and generate your own knowledge of the first and second types.

As well, it makes it harder for you to confirm the correctness of your own learning.

Drive-by teaching tends to only teach knowledge of the first type, and perhaps the second type. Knowledge of the third type is hard to nurture, but it's what allows fencers to improve themselves. However, if all of the people giving drive-by teaching know it for the same style, then they can give consistent feedback between teachers, and it can become useful again.

So, it would behoove us to have a specific style that everybody knows and can give feedback about. Then, when a student gains a certain, hard-to-define degree of competence, teachers can state that they will now give their own personal advice, rather than what Capoferro would want for them to give.

*****

My takeaways from writing this are as follows:

• We need a consistent teaching program, so that multiple teachers can give congruent feedback.
• I, as a teacher, want to focus on teaching students how to learn, going forward.
• Some day, I want to found a fencing school within the SCA. It sounds like a fun idea.

Anyhow. Feel free to comment how I'm Wrong and Bad below. 

Practice Report with Preliminary New-New-New Destreza

Practice was good yesterday. I didn't have as much endurance as I usually have, for a couple of reasons. I think I messed up my knee somehow recently. Also, I didn't sleep on Wednesday, and work has entered a minor burnout loop. (There are deadlines, so I work longer, and then over-promise based on how much work I think I will get done, and then under-deliver, so work becomes more stressful, so it's harder to concentrate on work, so try to compensate by working longer...)

Anyhow.

Practice. Right.

Practice was good yesterday. I hadn't been to practice in a while, but my new perspective on Destreza is already paying dividends. The new way I've been doing Destreza has been to only allow one place for my opponents to disengage to, and to always immediately push my opponent's sword to the cone of parallax, as per the earlier posts on parallax.

Reposting this picture. Cone/planes of parallax are on the right, and it grows wider as you get closer.

In my new Destreza-ish paradigm, there are a few specific actions which need explaining before I can say anything else. Assuming this all continues working, I'll probably make a more detailed post about them in the future, but here's what I have been doing. These are all sword actions, not footwork actions.

• Spiral inwards
• This is when I perform a circling motion with my sword, leading with the tip. The point of the motion is to "pull" my opponent's sword toward a direction, making their weak naturally slide onto my strong by the way my blade is angled.
• Generally, you slide from a stronger part of their blade to a weaker part of their blade as you do this, to make sure you touch a weak enough part of their blade to move them.
• Spiral outwards
• This is when I perform a circling motion with my sword, leading with the hilt. This "expels" or "pushes" my opponent's sword outwards. This leads to their weak naturally sliding toward my weak.
• Generally, you slide from a stronger part of their blade to a weaker part of their blade as you do this, to make sure you touch a weak enough part of their blade to move them.
• Push
• This is when I use my fully-extended-straight arm to push on their weak with the middle of my blade. Sometimes I angle in behind their sword a bit, in order to make my opposition stronger. As Fabris says, blade-angle is what matters most in opposition.
• Angled weak over/under strong ("Weak atajo")
• This is when I extend my arm along the plane of parallax, with my hand angled such that my blade points inwards toward their body. The implied point of contact with my blade is very close to the hilt here, so that the point of contact is along the plane of parallax.
• Line in Cross / Narrowing ("Strong atajo")
• This is when I perform a firm, wide parry. My arm should be extended along the plane of parallax, as should my blade. My blade should be angled such that I have as much width in the plane of parallax as possible.

So, given those building blocks, I did a couple of different things.

A spiral inwards transitioning to a spiral outwards with a strong atajo as we moved to the plane of parallax worked pretty well. It seems like that particular set of movements is super hard to escape with bladework, because of how strongly it limits where your opponent can move. It was hard to transition into an attack, but I think that's just something I need to drill with a partner. I probably just need to abandon the atajo earlier and go for a stab. I don't like how dependent on my off-hand I am for attacking from this position, though.

A push transitioning into a strong atajo on the opposite plane ended up being basically the same as the previous paragraph. Both of these actions were harder to attack when my atajo ended up on the left side, rather than when they were on the right side. I tried throwing cuts from those positions, too, but I don't think that the geometry is appropriate for being able to throw a quick cut. I also think that this action might be equivalent to the previous action, but for the moment they are separate in my brain.

Going directly into a strong atajo and then transitioning into the corresponding weak atajo on the opposite plane worked super well, and didn't have the problems with attacking that the previous two actions had. It was harder to get the positioning correct to safely go directly into the strong atajo, though. As well, I can't just attach this onto the above two actions because my body kept ending up too close to their body to transition into a weak atajo, when I did this.

All of the things worked okay, aside from the problems with attacking mentioned above. All of these problems would have been solved with a dagger, but I didn't have a dagger. Oh well.

*****

After that, I fought some with my traditional ideal setup of 45-inch sword and dagger. The work I've been doing with my 37-inch sword is really starting to show in my 45-inch game. My opposition is far, far better than it was before. I also have a more specific definition of find-gain-attack, which helped for performing safe thrusts. 

Basically, the "find" is a push to the inner cone of parallax while gaining the appropriate amount of penetration, and "gain" is a movement to have as much width as possible while continuing to push their sword to the outer cone of parallax. Then the thrust is a thrust, taking advantage of the time and distance covered during the previous two steps to trade width for stabbings.

As an aside - I have had a problem with the non-specificity of "find" and "gain" for a long time. This new definition is pretty spiffy, and seems accurate according to all of the definitions of "find" and "gain" that I've seen.

By the end of the night, my knee was hurting a bit, so I tried doing a more upright Italian stance. That wasn't the best idea in the world - I ended the night with a knot in my glutes, which was a weird feeling.

*****

So, in closing, this is the stuff I need to work on:

• Work on safely abandoning my strong atajos earlier to attack.
• Wear my right knee brace when fencing.
• Start thinking about why my point control isn't as good as it could be.
• Teaching, which will have blog post soon.

Have a good day!

Hundredth Published Post

Oh hey cool. This is the hundredth published post on the modern incarnation of my blog. I've been sword-blogging, off and on again, for nearly three years. My three-year blogiversary will be the 24th of February.

YAY!

Photograph copyright 2016 by Meredith Bailin Hull, who is awesome.

This is a photo from my OGR ceremony at Pennsic. One of the most joyful moments of my life, if I'm being perfectly honest.

I thought I'd take some time here and now to talk about a retrospective of my blog, because it is a useful exercise to look back at What Has Gone Before. And while meta is murder, one or two posts out of a hundred in service of The Art isn't that bad.

This blog started on a whim. I decided that I was frustrated that I didn't understand how to fence Destreza, so I wrote a flippant post on a tumblr I made in order to antagonize people who fence Destreza into defending their Art and addressing my concerns. It didn't really work, but it meant that I created a tumblr.

A year later, I started writing in it more, because I had many fencing thoughts and generally people didn't want to discuss fencing with me as much as I wanted to discuss random fencing theory. This became doubly true as I gradually realized that the work I truly enjoyed was entirely ignoring the established work of modern HEMA interpretations, in favor of creating my own. The joy in the work became the feedback loop of making a theory, testing it, and either refining it or scrapping it based on my results.

Indeed, I have created interpretations which "fly in the face of reason". This is part of the fun of the self-directed learning that our largely unstructured environment allows. Additionally, this self-directed interpretation makes life that much more exciting when I run across an instance of parallel construction of techniques in a historical manual, or in the teachings of another person.

There are downsides to my approach. There's a lot of back-tracking and deleting things which are just bad from my game. But I think it's worth it.

*****

Anyhow, for my 100th post, I wanted to grab a representative set of posts so that I could link them to people relatively quickly, and give people an overview of my blog. My blog currently only gets linked by my G+ account, and I'm thinking of linking it on Facebook, so having this as the first post people see would be useful.

• The Tumblr Days
• Bargain-Basement Destreza, part 1!
• Here it is. The post that started it all. In those days I had a far more flippant style. I had intended this blog to be overblown criticisms of various fencing styles, but that ended relatively swiftly. I eventually moved to Blogger because tumblr's comment system is the worst.
• The Tempest
• This is a bit of an interesting, non-standard post. Here, I detail one of the many things I did outside of my fencing in order to improve my fencing. At the time, I was feeling a lot of Tournament Anxiety. I chose to face a more intense form of public performance, so fencing in front of people would feel comparatively easy.
• Principles of Motion
• One of my first theory-posts. Here, I classify various mistakes that people make when fencing. I don't really use about the principles I outline here directly any more, but this post has historical importance to me. Also, the title is a nerdy reference to a role-playing game.

• Practice Reports
• Monday Practice
• This post contains an example of the all-important plus-minus-plus method for making oneself feel better about a terrible practice. I suggest you read it and make use of the plus-minus-plus method in your own fencing, and life in general. It sounds really dumb, and feels super awkward to do, but I swear it works.
• How to Fight Like a Lupold
• A bit of a weird practice report. This post outlines the full flowchart of how I used to fight, a few years ago. It uses terminology that rose fully-formed from my brain, to describe techniques which work well from a pragmatic viewpoint. There are a few fatal flaws with this style, but it's still a fun way to fight without having to think.

• Historical(-ish) Work
• Lupold's Simplified Bargain-Basement Destreza
• While I have come to believe that this is an incorrect interpretation of how to fight in a Spanish way, it's still a useful and interesting compendium of a complete style, detailed in the way I like to write. The reason I believe it is incorrect is because it doesn't work against the ideas raised in the below post, Penetration, Width, and Parallax.
• Fabris is Hard
• In the "Flying in the Face of Reason" category of things, I decided that guards are boring and skipped Fabris Book 1 after reading through it about 1/4 of the way. Onwards to Fabris Book 2! Here, I break down Fabris's Principles for Proceeding with Resolution into a set of simple mnemonics. This isn't detailed by any means,  but it's a useful reference-post.
• Fabris Principle 1
• This is an excruciatingly detailed breakdown of Fabris's Principle 1 for Proceeding with Resolution with Single Sword. It's intended to be used as a reference, so that you can take it in and drill portions of the Principle with a partner or practice dummy, eventually leading into drilling the entire thing based on your opponent's reactions.
• Quick Notes on Daggers
• I got salty about people on the internet saying that SCA daggers were too long, and wanted to compose a central repository of information stating that that, in the Spanish tradition, daggers are very long. If ever I started doing Sword Arts & Sciences, I'd probably use this post as a basis for whatever paper I wrote.

• Principles of Fencing
• Triangular Thrusts OR Opposition in Motion
• This post. I love this post above all other posts. Some day, I will actually finish filling in the illustrations that go with it. This post details how one can strictly win in a subset of relative guard positions. It is as close as possible to Truth that I have found in fencing.
• Touch, Small Angle, Large Angle, Renegotiate
• This is a decent post. It is very succinct, and describes a way of thinking about defense and attack in a very general, readable sense. I'm also pretty sure I was polled on the OGR list around when this post happened, because traffic to my blog briefly increased around this time.
• Penetration, Width, and Parallax
• My current baby. Here, I break down the three ways to overcome defenses, and the way to defend against each. I use bro-math to determine exactly how far one needs to parry in various circumstances. All of this is in service of attempting to learn how to use a shorter weapon, so I can better teach people how to beat people who outreach them.

And that's my blog. I feel good about the writing I've done on it. It is good work. It has improved my fencing. Some day I want to compose a book out of the contents of this blog, when I grow a bit more sure of myself and my fencing. I realize that nobody will read it, but having a book would make me feel good about myself.

Good job, Lupold. Good blog.

Fabris's Fourth Rule on Proceeding With Resolution in Single Sword

My 100th post is approaching, and I want to get it over with so I don't think too hard about "oh noes, what do I do for post 100?".

Because of this, I offer to you this article on Fabris's Fourth Rule on Proceeding With Resolution in Single Sword. I wrote it last June, then didn't post it for some reason. Once again, for my summary of Fabris's Rules on Proceeding With Resolution, see this post.

*****

Off-line steps are of particular interest to me recently, because I have been studying how to deal with more weapons when you have fewer weapons. Single, shorter rapier versus case of longer rapiers, for example. When you have fewer weapons than your opponent, there are precious few advantages to exploit against them - especially when you also have less reach than your opponent.

We can think of this fight in terms of shifting advantages. If we look at the initial approach into large measure (referring to my list of advantages for defense), this is the list of advantages that the shorter-single-bladed fighter can gain, before entering close measure:

• Obedience
• If your opponent has more range than you, there is a zone in which they are required to attack, in order to be able to attack before you get too close to thrust.
• "Out of Presence"
• This is why we're talking about Fabris's fourth rule - moving to the side forces your opponent to be out of your presence, if briefly.

There are several defensive advantages that they can only partially get, if their opponent is skilled. In particular:

• Tempo
• The longer-ranged opponent should wait until the correct opportunity to strike. Otherwise you are giving up a tempo.
• "Inside their Blade"
• A skilled case fighter should not be allowing you to gain opposition on both of their swords. One, perhaps, but not both.

The rest of the advantages, you by definition don't have, or you can only gain once you get close enough.

Conversely, your opponent has the following:

• Long distance
• Duh.
• Tempo
• They rely on you eventually committing your sword to a strong defense.
• Free implement
• If you only have one sword, they will have one sword free unless they allow you to get very good positioning.

In order to turn the tide, you need to neutralize as many of these advantages as possible, while maintaining your defensive advantages.

Neutralizing tempo is somewhat obvious but hard to execute effectively - don't commit your sword strongly to a defense. Adopt a counterguard, rather than pushing against their sword.

Forcing obedience is a bit trickier. This relies on your own sense of distance, and when your opponent can strike.

This leaves the final two contentious defenses - "Out of Presence" and Free Implement. Free Implement is outside of the scope of this post - it's hard to deal with someone's second sword, and relies on their specific stance.

*****

On first reading, I interpreted Fabris's fourth rule as follows:

• Keep your sword below your opponent's sword.
• Take an offline step, with a lean in the same direction.
• For example, step left and lean left.
• Check to see if your opponent followed your body with their tip.
• If they did
• Take their sword to the side opposite the direction of your step and step/lean in the direction opposite your original step.
• For example, take their sword to the inside and step to the right, while leaning to the right.
• This will place you in the same line as if you had stepped straight forward at the get-go.
• If they didn't
• Take their sword to the same side as the direction of your step, and step forward, maintaining your lean in the same original direction.
• For example, take their sword to the outside and step directly toward them, while maintaining your lean to the left.
• Stab them, having taken advantage of them being out of your presence.

That doesn't feel quite right though. There are about three tempi in there - one to take the first step, one to check on their direction, and one to take the second step. This gives your opponent far too much time to react.

If instead, we raise our tip during the offline step, this allows us to consider where they are during the step, rather than waiting to see afterwards.. This means we only have to burn two tempi, and makes for a much smoother action.