johnwang wrote:What will you do if your CMA teacher tells you this?
- You can only teach the form. You can not teach the application.
- If you teach the form, you should not correct your students if they make mistake.
- You can make the training easier for students even if it may violate the style principles.
- If you demonstrate your form in public, you should always add in some extra moves.
My initial knee-jerk reaction would be to find another teacher.
In thinking about it, I'd want to understand the motivation. For example, if I'm a "kindergarten" teacher, teaching only beginners, it might be my role to walk students through the form: it might not be my role to teach applications or provide corrections.
If my teacher's motivation was for me to hide/not teach anything of substance, I'd wonder what he wasn't willing to teach me. If one is a serious student, one forms a relationship with one's teacher that is between one and one's teacher. It might well be a different relationship than between another student and the teacher. In some relationships, the teacher might teach that student more than he'd be willing to teach another student. Some of that might depend upon how hard the student works at the material being taught. The student rarely knows fully whether or not he's the one getting all the "goods", or one of the students from whom material is held back. If a teacher is holding back material from some students, chances are good that he's holding back material from me as well.
There is also the other half of the equation.
What would you do if, as a teacher
- your students aren't interested in applications, only learning forms
-when you teach the form, students don't incorporate the corrections you provide them
-when you teach the details, the students don't work hard enough to ever learn them and what they do is a simplified version because the "real stuff" is too difficult for them
-when they demonstrate in public they have trouble remembering the sequence of the forms?