Thirty hours on about 3-4 hours fitful sleep, then a two hour nap and finish the day and... 0700, in Scotland, having breakfast and sleep cycle fully adjusted to local time. Feeling pretty good.
The first reviews on the "Facing Violence" DVDs are in. I think David Silver did a great job editing it. Three hours, covers most of the material. I catch little places where I would phrase things differently. It would have been nice to do a more packed mass brawl... but just for the short demo of an Articulation War exercise... I think it's nice.
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Thought for the day-- a friend with great ideas, all the right stuff, wants to get into teaching. She has the skills and the perspective that so many lack, but like a lot of people, the perfect is the enemy of the good. She is stressing over how to explain everything so perfectly that everybody can understand it. It's not just her. A friend who will not be named (but his initials are probably Marc MacYoung) has been driving himself nuts over making the ConCom book perfect.
To all the people considering teaching: There's no such thing as perfect. Not perfect knowledge and not perfect communication. That's just the way it is.
But here's the cool part. That's not just okay, that's good. Because no matter what you teach, no matter who you are, you aren't perfect either. Which means whatever you give them, some of your students can and will make it better.
Give them the best skeleton you can. The stripped-down, clean foundation of good knowledge and let them put the flesh on it and some-- maybe only a few, maybe many-- will create something significantly better than you have. Because you aren't all that. Do your best, let it go. Your students will amaze you.
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Three classes in Edinburgh over the next three days, then Swindon and Sheffield. Then on to points south: Israel, Slovenia and Greece.
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The Drills manual rewrite for the print version is in. The final edit for "Campfire Tales from Hell" done and the manuscript sent to M&D to do with as they will. I'll let you know when it's up. Great information.
Working on something fun, under a pseudonym-- a collection of some of the stories I told my kids when they were growing up. It's very clear that I was a terrible father, but "Horrible Stories I told My Children" is pretty funny (at least to me, but I was there.)
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Edit-- After I posted this I did a quick search and it looks like "Campfire Tales" is up on Kindle and in various formats on SmashWords. I'm excited.
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5 comments:
My experience of teaching is that the closer you get to 'perfect' (whatever that might mean) the duller it gets to deliver. The buzz you get from a session where your students have taken what you've shown them, run with it, improved it, mangled and mutilated it and then brought it back to you stronger than it was? Can't beat that.
"Horrible Stories I Told My Children" sounds like a wonderful book, one I could share with my son.
"Perfection is the seeking of it for to be perfect is a journey and not an end result."
:-)
I think I needed to read that bit on teaching. I agree with jfs that it can become duller if it becomes "perfect" so I try to mix it up. Oh and I don't teach in a dojo or studio, but this is a good read for teachers of many kinds.
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