Not a great turnout at practice last night. I spent a lot of time with Theo, who is the 16-year-old daughter of Bruce Tiffney, the dean of the college at UCSB I graduated from. She's very sweet and very enthusiastic, but isn't very coordinated. It's like she's spent more time reading and studying than exercising--I imagine I must have been a lot like her when I first started fencing. I got to practice my single against her, which was my only goal for the day, and one of the benefits of fencing with someone so new is that I've got time to analyze my own technique and positioning as I'm doing it, rather than worrying about getting punked in the head and having to start over again.
I was giving her a lot of advice in (what I hope were) bite-sized chunks, and tried to be big on the positive reinforcement. One of the biggest hangups I have learning fencing stuff is that often when I learn something new I like to repeat it three or four times before I can really feel the motion, like it's imprinting itself in my muscle memory. I can understand the how and why of new concepts very quickly, but I need to repeat the motion a few times before I can really start to associate the sensation with "correctness" in my brain and try to make it instinctive. Although I guess if I'm *trying* to make something instinctive I'm sort of defeating myself. This Zen shit is hard! :)
Anyway, I got Theo performing basic lunges with the line closed at appropriate measure with good arm and body position and had her repeat each motion three or four times. I explained some basic tempo and physics stuff about why a lunge protects the attacker even when the opponent counterattacks, and she seemed to get that pretty well. Manda was watching the whole thing and I kept waiting for some additional commentary, but she didn't say anything, so I guess I was doing okay. She's is a fantastic teacher, in my opinion--not many people have the ability to look at someone's body and almost immediately see what's wrong and how to fix it, but I guess she's been watching people fence and learn to fence for so long it's pretty second nature for her. Maybe in three or four years I'll be there too.
I realized as Theo and I were fencing that I could explain what she needed to do in terms of body position and tempo pretty clearly (I think!) but when it came to explaining why I was killing her so often even when she was trying really hard to bat my sword around with all this slashy shit, my language got more vague. This is obviously an indicator of not understanding it as well as I think I do... but which aspects, exactly, I'm not understanding are still a little confusing. Oy.
Part of why she didn't kill me is because she wasn't putting any real force behind any of the slashy crap--there are guys in Isles who can get me with that stuff just because they wham their swords around like the goddamn Highlander and try to grapple with you and end up ganking you messily and too hard with their dagger, other sword, or baton... but that's neither here nor there. Theo did get me a couple times with some very pretty lunges that went in almost exactly the right place--when she was doing Italian stuff her kill/death ratio leveled out dramatically. I don't know if this was because we were both doing Italian or what. Anyway...
I guess this post isn't really about my game, but it's just as interesting for me to analyze someone else's (how apt or inept that analysis is, I can't say). I don't know how to improve my teaching, or if I'm even in a position to be teaching yet... you can't really get adequate feedback from newbies because they're so uncertain anyway, many of them aren't sure if they aren't understanding or if you aren't articulating clearly. In my opinion, the second is usually indicated by the first, but sometimes people have more trouble understanding one particular bit of information or they're like me and they think they get it until they start doing it and then they realize how hard it is. :) It's hard to tell if I was helping Theo last night or just confusing her more--she's so eager to please, I think she was afraid to ask questions.
I should ask Manda how I'm doing, she wouldn't hold any punches. :)
Hopefully I'll get a little bit more self-study in at Angels this weekend.
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