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.