Understanding School Bullying Policies

I know in my last post I assured everyone that I had a Takeaway Technique for you, but I'm putting that off yet again.  It is coming, I promise, but today I'm taking a quick detour to talk about bullying policies.

Oh, high school, how I don't miss you.  Photo Credit.

In the United States where I live, schools' policies about bullying vary between school districts and individual schools.  Private schools especially are likely to have their own school-specific policy, but even in public schools there is no guarantee of consistency from one school to the next.  Most anti-bullying policies sound good on paper, but in practice some are better than others.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are working for a school and have been tasked with writing a school's bullying policy.  Obviously, you don't want bullying to happen at all, but you recognize that it will happen, and what you write determines how it will be handled.  So, how should it be handled?

Ideally, if you are in that position of power, your primary goal will be to minimize bullying and protect the victims.  However, this is very hard to do with a policy.  How do you create a blanket statement for how bullying will be punished fairly?  How do you handle cases that are not clear-cut as far as who the instigator is and who the victim is?  What do you do if the school misjudges who is the aggressor and instead punishes the kid who was only trying to defend himself?  What do you do if the parents of the students involved don't agree with how the school has handled the problem?  And, what happens if your policy seems fair on paper, but eventually an edge case comes up where everyone can see that a bully is behaving egregiously, but according to "the letter of the law," he has done nothing wrong?

Creating a fair and effective bullying policy can get especially murky when the bullying is not physical and occurs in digital spaces that are less visible to teachers and parents.

Violence is incredibly complex (and bullying even more so because it is not always physical), so creating a policy to handle bullying can be daunting.  One solution is to make it vague, giving educators and administrators more leeway in handling specific cases.  This comes at a price, though, because educators and administrators are often already stretched very thin.  This gives them an extra workload, and a high-pressure one at that.  What happens if they make a mistake and mishandle a case?  What happens if the case is handled fairly, but the bully's parents disagree and threaten to sue?  Can the school afford to pay damages?  What will happen to the quality of education if the school has to pay out a massive settlement?

One way to protect against this is to minimize transparency.  The school probably already has a policy to protect the privacy of students' personal information including grades and disciplinary record.  By expanding the confidentiality policy, you can ensure that the victim and the victim's family don't learn of how the situation was addressed at all.  All you have to say is "We are conducting an investigation and will respond appropriately."  The parents will have to take your word that the situation is being addressed sufficiently.

With this kind of policy, the school is protected and the students' well-being is entrusted to the adults who can address the situation on a case-by-case basis.  So, is this policy effective?

Hopefully.  'Cause this is awful.  Photo Credit.

Hopefully, under a policy like this, the teachers and parents will handle any situations well.  Usually the school and its employees have the best of intentions, but when it comes to resolving issues, the policy will protect them but not help them.

If you are the victim, the parent of a victim, or the instructor of the victim, it can seem like the bully has more rights than those who actually need protection.

Suppose a larger boy corners one of your students in a bathroom stall and physically attacks him.  What should your student do?  If he physically defends himself in a school with a zero tolerance policy, he'll face the same punishment as the bully.  The school doesn't have to determine which kid was in the wrong and just suspends both of them for fighting.  Telling students to never fight under any circumstances puts a tremendous amount of pressure on the victim who must choose between enduring the abuse until an adult arrives, or physically defend himself against school rules.  In order to physically defend himself, he not only has to stand up to a bully but also the school itself.

So in this case, should your student put up with physical abuse until an adult intervenes?  The worst bullying tends to happen when adults are not around, so he might endure a lot if he doesn't fight back.  If he goes this route and trusts the system, what if the system doesn't stop the bullying, or even makes it worse?  That can happen if a bully is punished and wants to retaliate against the victim for reporting them.

In this case, the victim and the victim's family most likely won't be allowed to know anything about how the situation was addressed.  They might ask for the bully to be removed from the classroom or otherwise denied access to the victim.  This is extremely unlikely to be allowed.  A far more common solution is to offer to remove the victim from the classroom.

Understandably, this option is not popular with victims.  A kid who has been bullied extensively probably has very poor self esteem and is at least somewhat socially ostracized.  Having that kid sit at their own separate lunch table or stay in the classroom at recess is not going to be good for that student's social or mental well-being.  And if the victim turns down this kind of "help," well then gosh, I guess the bullying wasn't that serious after all!

Adults enforcing the social isolation that the bullies intend to cause is not exactly a solution.  Photo Credit.

Not every school is like this, and not every situation plays out like this.  In fact, this is more of a hypothetical worst-case-scenario.  (Not really, it certainly does get worse.)  But if you encounter a school's bullying policy that seems ineffective, frustrating, or just makes no sense, try thinking of the policy as a tool to protect the school rather than a tool to protect the students.  If it suddenly starts making sense in that light, at least you will have an understanding that will help you in future interactions with the school.

How to Vet Someone

We have to trust people in our lives.  There's no getting around it.  You trust the other drivers to stay in their lanes.  You trust your doctor to prescribe you the correct medication.  You trust your spouse to behave responsibly with the kids.  And the good news is, this trust is usually reasonable and soundly placed.  But sometimes we can end up in bad situations because of misplaced trust.

Never trust anthropomorphized punctuation marks.  photo credit

The answer is not to be perpetually suspicious of everyone.  That is no way to live.  But there are some things you can do to be safer.

Trust Your Gut

Your first line of defense is your initial interaction with the person.

Your brain can hold on to seven details (give or take) at once.  That means at any given moment, you are ignoring the vast majority of the details around you.  It's called Miller's Law, and if you'd like to read more about it as it pertains to self protection, I can highly recommend Blink by Malcolm Gladwell and The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker.  But for now just understand that you have a biological limitation of considering only a few details at once.  In order for you to function as a person, your brain has to efficiently choose and filter those most important details quickly and accurately, discarding the rest.

A side effect of this phenomenon is that you can have a visceral reaction to a person or situation and not understand why.  If you feel a gut-wrenching fear when meeting a stranger in a public place, you might not know why.  Some people will tell themselves that because they don't know why they feel that way, they're being foolish, that there is nothing to worry about.  We all have social conditioning toward being polite, which is usually a good thing, but it can sometimes make us less safe.  That fear was caused by something--maybe the person was dressed far too warmly for the weather in a way that could easily conceal a weapon, or maybe the person was standing too close, or maybe the person parked right next to you in an otherwise empty parking lot, or maybe someone is just too determined to give you help you didn't ask for.

What if they just pose for creepy-looking stock photos?

Your brain won't necessarily remember those details.  You probably also won't remember the air temperature, what color his shoes were, or what the floor was made of.  Those details weren't important, so your brain filtered them away.  The important detail was that you were facing a threat.

If a coworker "creeps you out," or the guy you've hired to mow your lawn inexplicably makes you uncomfortable every time you see him, you want to take those warning signs seriously.  Trusting your gut will do a lot toward making sure the people you let into your life are worthy of being there.

Look Them Up

This section will probably be less useful to those who live outside of the United States, but there may be similar resources in your country.

So, they didn't creep you out or raise any red flags when you met them, and now you're considering bringing this person into your life.  The idea is to do a little due diligence before giving someone access to you or your family.  If you need a pet sitter, if you have a new boyfriend, if you're signing your kids up at a local martial arts school, etc., you will need to trust a person who you don't know very well.  But if the person has a criminal history, you can probably find out.

A history of domestic violence is a solid predictor of future violence.  photo credit

A quick note before using any of these tools--If you are looking up this kind of information for employment purposes, the laws are different and more restrictive.  Check your state laws before doing a background check for employment purposes.  You can still do it, you just have to do a little extra work.

1.  Federal Searches

First there are the federal tools, which you can use in any state.  The first is the National Sex Offender Registry.  This is a free resource that lets you type in a name.  Alternatively you can search by location, which is handy if you are moving to a new neighborhood.  The other federal tool is PACER, which allows you to access public court records such as criminal convictions.  Some of its features are not free, but you can search for names without paying a fee.

2.  State and Local Searches

The next thing to do is to check their local public records.  This is another one that requires some caution as the laws are different from state to state regarding which records are public.  In general, you can look at your own records, or you can look at someone else's records if they consent to it.  Some states make the records public regardless.  My home state of Wisconsin does this, and you can type any name into this website to look for criminal convictions.  Many states have similar tools, and a quick internet search should tell you whether your state or territory is one of them.  Barring that, you can visit the local police station and court house.

If the person has lived in more than one state, you'll have to check multiple states to get a complete picture.  There are some commercial services that will do this for you, but their accuracy varies.  You are better off doing the search yourself, if you can.  But if you don't know all of the states a person has lived in and you want to check the entire country, it may be worthwhile to use such a service.

3.  Internet Searches

The easiest but least reliable method of looking someone up is to just do an internet search.  But it's dubious... if you type my name into Google, for example, you are likely to find a whole lot about the much more famous television personality of the same name.  You could find me by adding "Martial Journeys" to my name, but you would only see my professional life.  It would be very hard for you to use Google to find my Star Trek Dresden Files crossover fan fiction.  Mostly because I never wrote any.

Or did I?  I didn't.  photo credit

But if I did, you probably wouldn't find it unless you knew to look for it.  So it's hard to know whether your new babysitter runs a dog-fighting business on the side, or is prominently involved in a hate group, or whatever, unless you specifically thought to check for those things.  And you can't check for everything.

However, there are a few things you can do to make the process a little less useless.  First, search for their name and any aliases you know of.  Try a search for their name and add either their profession or the state or city they live in.  See if you can find their social media accounts.  Do a Google Image search and click the "visit website" option to see what the related content is.

Taking a few minutes with a search engine to try to vet someone before you let them too deeply into your life can save you a lot of pain down the road.

One Last Note:  Find a Balance

One thing that we as martial artists (especially instructors!) have to remember is that balance is important.  Training in martial arts should make your life better.  If you make yourself so nervous and so cautious of everyone around you that you are unable to relax and enjoy your life, you might live longer, but it won't be much of a life.  If you are so carefree that you obliviously walk right up to a threat and end up in some trouble, that is obviously not right either.  You need to find a balance.  There's no need to vet every single person you encounter.  But for the big, high stakes question marks in your life and your family's life, it's often worth doing.

Training is an Engineering Problem

On April 13th, 1970, an oxygen tank blew up aboard the Apollo 13 spacecraft.

This caused a quadruple system failure--something the astronauts hadn't been trained to handle because it was assumed that if four systems failed at once 200,000 miles from Earth, it would be impossible for them to survive.  But on their doomed lunar mission, that is exactly what happened.  The astronauts and ground crew had to find creative solutions to problems no one had anticipated.

This is not where you want to be when everything around you starts to break.

At one particularly dramatic moment in the Apollo 13 movie, the engineers on the ground are given the instructions, "We need to make THIS fit into THIS using nothing but THIS."  The actor then dramatically dumps a box of junk onto the table, and everyone gets to work.  (I'm paraphrasing, the actual quote from the movie is here.)

They needed to make round lithium hydroxide canisters fit into holes designed for square canisters using only what they had with them in the spacecraft.  You can read all the gritty details here, but for now just understand that if they could not do this, three people were going to die of carbon dioxide poisoning.

This was one of several engineering problems they had to solve to get the astronauts home safely.  The academic solution would have been easy.  Just design and manufacture an airtight seal of the appropriate dimensions and place it over the hole.  Of course, that wasn't an option for the crew of Apollo 13.

That is the quintessential engineering problem--making something work despite far less than ideal conditions.  But even though we usually think of engineering problems in terms of technology, it's often useful to apply the same thinking to other problems.

Apollo 13 liftoff.  It was a marvel of engineering to even get this far.

My broad use of the terms "engineering problem" and "academic problem" come from The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch, (which is excellent reading or watching, by the way), where he explains raising his kids after being diagnosed with terminal cancer.  His professional background was split between academics and engineering, so those were the two ways that he knew how to solve problems.  He said that if he approached raising his kids as an academic problem, he would certainly fail.  He would objectively be a terrible parent because he would disappear from their lives at a young age.  But by approaching it like an engineering problem, knowing that he won't be there for most of their lives, how can he plan for it and give his family as much as possible for the future before he disappeared?

I find this thinking to be very valuable because most problems are engineering problems, but very often people approach them like academic problems.

One example that comes to mind is when a coworker complaining to me about one of our bosses.  He had a laundry list of faults about how this boss was terrible at his job and bad for the company, but there was no one higher up in the company willing to take any action against him.  My coworker complained to me that he should not behave this way.  And he was right, no one in that role should behave that way.  But oxygen tanks shouldn't explode, and fathers shouldn't die when their children are young.  Sometimes you have to deal with things that should not be, and build a solution under less than ideal circumstances.  My coworker and I had to make a round peg of a boss fit into a square hole of a company using nothing but the tools and skills at our disposal, because it was an engineering problem.  Was it fair?  Of course not.  But neither are quadruple system failures or pancreatic cancer.

Most workplace problems are engineering problems.

Once you start classifying problems as either academic or engineering, they become a lot easier to solve.  In my case, I started seeing engineering problems everywhere.  Difficult training partner?  Engineering problem.  Opening a school on a shoestring budget?  Engineering problem.  Siblings not getting along while I'm teaching?  Engineering problem.  Scheduling issues?  Budget issues?  Personnel issues?  Engineering problems.  As an added benefit, once you start looking at your engineering problem in terms of the tools you have to solve it, it becomes less of a problem and more of a puzzle.

Applying this thinking to your training can help you improve more efficiently.  The first time I encountered this, it was before I had ever considered academic problems or engineering problems.  I was a high school student on a volleyball team.

There were a couple star players on the team, but most of us were beginners and our coach had to teach us all the basic skills.  At one practice she showed us how to dig for a ball that had gone flying off away from the intended target.  It was difficult--dive after the ball, propel yourself along the ground with your free arm, let the ball bounce off your hand instead of the ground--for the small chance that someone else would be able to rush in and return the ball over the net before it hit the floor.  Long before we felt comfortable with the skill, we stopped working on it.

It's really hard! photo credit

Our coach explained that she was only introducing us to the skill, that she didn't want us to get good at it.  She said that at our level, our practice time was far better spent on core skills, learning our basics well enough to prevent the ball from flying off unpredictably in the first place.

It made sense.  We were (mostly) novice volleyball players with a limited amount of practice time.  Approaching it as an academic problem, we would have been doomed to failure--objectively unskilled players at the end of the season.  We could certainly get better as the season progressed, but it was not realistic for us to master every single skill.  But our coach approached it as an engineering problem (although I doubt if she would have called it that) and looked for how to make the team as successful as possible using only the players, tools and time available to her.

Martial arts training is also an engineering problem.  Real life violence is infinitely more complex than a volleyball game.  Even dedicated students seldom practice, say, five hours per week.  But even with that much training, it is not possible to master every single skill that might be useful in a violent encounter.

Here is a very incomplete list of potentially useful skills:
- the punching skills of professional boxer
- the kicking skills of a taekwondo Olympian
- the throwing skills of a judo master
- an equivalent mastery in every weapon, improvised weapon and firearm
- an equivalent mastery in awareness and de-escalation skills
- an equivalent mastery in active shooter and bomb threat situations
- an equivalent mastery in crowd psychology

That is the academic solution--to prepare for everything you might need.  But it's not possible.  Even if you did not sleep, there would not be enough hours in the day to attain all of those skills to that high of a level.

Training doesn't look like an engineering problem, but it is.

So how do we look at this like an engineering problem instead?

1.  Define the goal.  

If you are training to win a judo tournament, you can probably skip all that boxing stuff.  If you're training purely for self defense, there's a lot of footwork and complex kicking that a high level taekwondo athlete would need but you can safely ignore.  If you're trying to pass your next belt test, you can put other skills on the back burner while you focus on promotion requirements.  Being clear and honest with yourself about what the goal is should help a lot.

2.  Prioritize what is common.

If you've got a tournament coming up, maybe it's legal to throw a kick to the head in the middle of a double back flip, but you are far more likely to face a garden variety roundhouse kick.  So practice defending and countering a roundhouse kick.  Depending on the rules of the tournament, roundhouse kicks are usually more common than other types of kicks.  Punches are usually more common than ridgehands.

Self defense training, in my opinion, is where this goes wrong most often.  It's easy for us as martial artists to fall into the trap of thinking that certain techniques are widely taught, so we stand a reasonable chance of facing them in real situations.  The fact remains that no matter how widely an arm bar is taught, we are far more likely to face a push or a punch than an arm bar.

3.  Prioritize based on the progression of the event.

Just like when I was playing volleyball, there are decisions to be made about how much time to train for preventing a bad situation and how much time to spend on recovering from that bad situation.

This is going to make some people mad, but it's true.  If your goal is self defense (again, see #1), you are better off prioritizing preventing bad things from happening.  Prevent going to the ground by learning to end the fight before it goes there.  Prevent getting in a physical altercation by learning to de-escalate.  Prevent needing to de-escalate by avoiding a situation before it has the chance to turn tense.

Not getting into a fight is a skill!  It might not be as fun to work on (Is your goal to have fun?  Nothing wrong with that!), but if you are training because you are truly concerned for your safety, this is where you need to spend the bulk of your time.  Don't ignore your physical skills of course, but your training time is better spent learning how to not need your physical skills.

4.  Work on principles.

You can train more efficiently by working on principles rather than techniques.  If you understand what you can do when an arm is extended toward you, it will matter a lot less whether the person is trying to punch you, push you, grab you, and so on.  If you deeply understand how a hinge joint works, you can exploit its limitations whether you are manipulating someone's arm, leg, finger, or toe.  It is a more difficult way to teach and learn, but ultimately it is more efficient than trying to ingrain a myriad of specific techniques to handle different but similar situations.  That's the academic solution--to know the exact answer to the exact situation.  Violence is just too complex to learn that many techniques.

Motivation, Martial Arts and Video Games

Remember in that last post when I said I once wrote and lost an essay about what martial arts has to do with video games?  Well, I found it.  I wasn't even looking for it.  But here it is, cleaned up a bit from its original form.  Enjoy!

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Teaching Martial Arts and Making Video Games Aren’t All That Different (2011 Essay)

In 2005, I signed up at a new martial arts school shortly after starting a new job as a scripter and gameplay programmer at a video game company.  I spent my days crafting engaging gameplay experiences among young, eccentric and irreverent creative minds, and I spent my evenings sweating in the reserved structure of the taekwondo school.  At work I went out of my way to be just as irreverent as my coworkers, making sure use some spicy language for the benefit of a few coworkers who felt it necessary to curb their language and expression in my presence.  After work, I had to flip a switch and turn it all off to be respectful of the martial art and the dojang where I trained.  In the mornings, everything revolved around creativity and discarding old ideas just because they had been done before, but in the evenings old ideas were revered because they were traditional.  I felt like every day I was living in two separate worlds that couldn’t be more different.

Several years later, I find myself thinking the opposite.

The project I was working on at the time.

Despite the many and obvious differences, teaching a martial arts class and scripting a video game level are both done with a goal of providing a fun and rewarding experience.

What most people outside of the game industry don’t realize is that like martial arts classes, video game levels are also learning environments.  For each game on the shelves, the rules are slightly different.  Those rules need to be taught to the player, or the player cannot enjoy the game.  It must be obvious to the player that doing A will result in B. Since lengthy tutorials can be tedious and not fun, game developers find themselves in the same situation as martial arts instructors.  Material needs to be taught, and it has to be rewarding or the student/player will not continue.

The first game I ever worked on.  Let's just say it would be an example of something.

Immersyve, a consulting company that works with game developers (among other things), explains the psychology of what makes good games so engaging.  They point to three key factors:  autonomy, competence, and relatedness.  They argue that when players can direct themselves and make meaningful decisions (autonomy), play the game with a high degree of skill as taught by their earlier experience with the game (competence), and enjoy interaction beyond themselves either socially or within the fictional world (relatedness), the game is engaging and players will return again and again.

In Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us, Daniel H. Pink argues that whether we are in the workplace, at school, or in a recreational environment, we are most motivated when we have three key components:  autonomy, mastery and purpose.  He explains that when people are given the freedom to pursue things the way that they see fit (autonomy), can work toward being better at doing it (mastery), and are able to work toward something larger than themselves (purpose), they are most motivated and most productive.

Either that, or maybe it's cheesy corporate posters that motivate us.

While reading Drive, I couldn’t help but notice the similarity.  (It was no surprise to me when later I found that the minds behind Immersyve and Daniel Pink both cite the same sources in psychological literature.)  Moreover, I couldn’t help but think that it very accurately reflects my martial arts experience.

Autonomy is emphasized with every new open-world game that hits the shelves.  But when we think about martial arts, we usually think about discipline and rigid compliance over autonomy.  Even so, autonomy is successful in the dojang.  Allowing students to choose their own goals, whether it is a rank, or a trophy, or a fitness level, or whatever else, is much more motivating than goals that are imposed by an instructor. (Or a parent!  Great example of that here.)

On the other hand, mastery/competence is easy to see in both venues.  Doing something well, or even just getting better at doing it, is rewarding.  It’s true in practically every recreational activity in the world, but in martial arts, it’s not only true, it’s also often considered a particularly noble goal to do something well purely for the sake of doing it well.

Of course, getting a new belt is usually pretty cool, too.

As for purpose/relatedness, that is equally important to game developers and martial arts instructors.  Players and students want to feel like they have gained something for their efforts.  They want to be part of a community.  They want to believe that their time was well spent and the result has value.  This is much, much easier for martial arts instructors than it is for game developers, who are confined to virtual worlds.  But the idea is the same.

I find this stuff fascinating.  I hope some of you do, too.

How to Teach or Learn Any Physical Skill: Martial Arts and Drumming Part I

This is Part 1 of 3 in the Martial Arts and Drumming series.

This project started innocently enough.  I thought that in lieu of my 50 States Challenge, I'd try something I've never done before and see what I could learn from it as a martial artist.  My vision was distant and vague, but I thought I'd write a blog post for my students to illustrate the value in being open-minded to new experiences and willing to learn in any situation. 

Four months of drumming lessons, interviews and general pandemonium later, this sure has snowballed.  I'm honored that there has been so much interest in this project.  I have been very far outside of my comfort zone on this project, and it has been one crazy and awesome ride.  I hope you find something of value here, or at least that you enjoy it even half as much as I did.

Being a Terrible Drummer (or a terrible martial artist for that matter)

There is very little about drumming that I can speak to with any degree of authority, but one thing I can say is that being a terrible drummer is awesome.  It is so awesome that I almost feel sorry for people who are actually good at it.

As a beginner, I'm supposed to be a terrible drummer, but more importantly, I'm allowed to be a terrible drummer.  I can sit down to practice some simple rhythm and make a mistake in every single measure, and the worst thing that is going to happen is a big dopey grin.  The stick in my left hand can bounce so chaotically that you might think I have some serious medical condition, but that just makes two consecutive good strokes feel like a real victory.  Move over, Hercules—this legend just played a whole fill!  (Cue the cheers and ticker tape.)

I will never look this cool playing the drums.  Good thing
blogging is the ultimate form of artistic expression.  It is, right?

I don’t have that in martial arts anymore, and haven’t for a long time.  In martial arts, I have expectations on me.  If I do something badly, it reflects poorly on me, my school, and my instructors.  I have students who are counting on me to train them well, provide good information and set a great example.  Don't get me wrong—I love it.  It's still fun, but it's a very different kind of fun. 

As an instructor, I greatly enjoy seeing a struggling white belt who is having fun.  Here's the thing about people who do something badly and are still having fun:  if they're having fun, they're going to practice.  If they practice, they'll get better.  In my experience, the people who are having fun in martial arts go the farthest, regardless of whatever natural talent they may or may not have.  They're the ones who stick with it and persevere when things get tough.

So what that means for me as a terrible drummer is that it's just a matter of time before I'm merely a bad drummer.  If being a bad drummer is as much fun as being a terrible drummer, I'll someday be a mediocre drummer.  And if that's fun, well, by then I'll probably be 150 years old and my interest will probably have waned, but you get the idea.  When I started martial arts, I never thought I'd do any of the crazy things I did.  I was one of those picked-last-in-gym-class kids.  When I was a white belt, I had this lofty goal of being a green belt someday.  People who know me as a 4th degree black belt tend to find that pretty funny, but there's an important lesson there.  Please, if you take nothing else from this blog, just go do something fun.  Don't worry about whether or not you're good at it.

That said, let me set this straight now.  There will never be video evidence of me playing drums.  That would be ceaselessly vain.  (Would you keep reading if you knew that I was lying?)

I have no idea what I'm doing! Photo credit.

One caveat that instructors need to watch out for is that teaching your students to love an activity is a learning goal, not a retention goal.  Especially when it comes to teaching kids, sometimes the students' enjoyment of class is cynically filed under business goals, because if they're having fun their parents will keep paying.  There's some truth to that, but by thinking of fun as a retention mechanism and not a learning mechanism, you're doing your students a disservice.  Likewise, teaching your students to enjoy martial arts is not the same as teaching them to enjoy a class.  You can take a group of kids, play games with them for 90% of a class, and send them home happy.  They might have had fun, but they have not learned to enjoy martial arts.  As an instructor, your challenge is to make the 100th roundhouse kick of the day as fun and engaging as the 10th.  Then your students have learned their roundhouse kick lesson and also have developed a positive attitude toward roundhouse kicks.

Poison for Beginners

Being a beginner is a delicate time when you're deciding whether this new activity is for you.  The best thing a beginner can do is establish a positive relationship with whatever they're trying to learn, whether it's drumming or martial arts or anything else.  If you can love it, you're halfway there at least.  If that means skipping a day when you're not in the mood, that is completely fine for a beginner!  Having the discipline to practice when you're not in the mood comes later, after you have already decided that what you're doing is important enough to endure the grind.

I absolutely hate it when people advise beginners to practice every day.  No one gets good at anything because they decide they will practice every day.  They get good either because they are forced to practice, or because they love doing it.  If they are forced, they will resent the activity and quit as soon as they can.  It's the people who love it who go on to become great.  Look at any great achiever in any field.  They didn't get there without hard work, but the passion always comes first.  It's that passion that allowed them to do all that work.  You're no different, and your students are no different.

Let's not poison this eager learner.

Poison for beginners is anything that can damage the student's relationship with the activity.  It can come in a lot of forms, but the most common forms are frustration and boredom.  If you're the instructor, you need to read your beginners very well and steer them clear.  This is easier said than done of course, but a good teacher can do it by encouraging at the right times, pacing the lesson well, or scaling the difficulty of the practice.

I was very lucky to have a drum instructor who excelled at this, and I'll share a story about that later, but first I need to introduce one more concept...

The Uncomfortable Place of Growth

The "uncomfortable place" is practice that is at the optimal challenge level.  It is right at the very limit of your skill where you are working very hard.  Being there gets you the most efficient growth but is exhausting.  If it's too hard, you'll get very little out of it.  If it's too easy, you'll get even less.  It's that sweet spot in between where the growth happens, but it is by nature uncomfortable.  That's why it's called "being out of your comfort zone."

How much time you should spend in that uncomfortable place depends on a lot of things.  Beginners should keep their time in that zone short.  Too much time in the uncomfortable place can make them learn to dislike the activity because practicing that way is decidedly not fun.  They might approach that place with enthusiasm, but staying there too long without breaks will wear anyone down.  Age matters, but not as much as temperament.  Reading the student(s) is paramount.

Adults often (but not always) have more patience for
the uncomfortable place than young kids do.

One thing to keep in mind is that there are two ways out of the uncomfortable place.  A good teacher knows how and when to manage both of them.  The first is when the student gets better.  Suppose you're working on some detail of your technique--let's say keeping the spine straight and relaxed during a front kick.  Let's say you get it right 10% of the time, so you practice for half an hour until you get it right 90% of the time.  By the end of that half hour, you are no longer in the uncomfortable place.  You are enjoying a high success rate, and you are still improving, but not as much or as quickly as you were before.  If you want to stay in the uncomfortable place, you need to increase the difficulty, for example by increasing the speed.

The second way out of the uncomfortable place is when you dial back the difficulty of the practice.  Let's go back to the front kick spine example.  Let's say the student is getting it right 10% of the time, and after half an hour of practice he's getting it right 15% of the time.  This student is absolutely still in the uncomfortable place.  However, this student is also getting poison.  Veteran martial artists (or substitute any skill you like) have already made a commitment to their art, and can endure a little poison.  But the beginner who is still deciding whether they like this crazy martial arts thing is not likely to respond well to the frustration.  Even if they're not frustrated, they are most likely not having fun.

I've seen instructors who are very good at reading their students, and others who are completely oblivious.  I've seen my drum instructor spin on a dime when he suspected I was getting frustrated, changing gears so fast it was almost comical.  It's exactly what I would have done--it's better to overreact than underreact with beginners.  On the other extreme, I once saw a martial arts instructor bombard a beginner with a dozen details on one movement for a full hour with no breaks from being in the uncomfortable place.  This usually does not end well.

It doesn't always end badly, though.  It all comes down to reading the student, and as promised I have a story about my drum instructor doing this to me successfully.  One day I wondered if my instructor (Kai Andersen, who I will introduce properly in Part II of this series) might be a bit perplexed because most of the music I listen to doesn't lend itself to beginner drum lessons.  So I suggested a song that was slow and repetitive enough that I might be able to play it.  At my next lesson, he listened to the song for the first time.  He penciled some changes to a couple exercises in my lesson book so that I essentially had sheet music for the song.  But since what he had written was still too advanced for me, he scaled it back and built a challenge-appropriate lesson on the fly using that song as a guide, and I spent the entire time in the uncomfortable place, making good progress.  I was mentally exhausted by the end of it, and also really impressed with Kai.

Can You Even Teach Art?

A while back, Barry Eisler did an interview with Kris Wilder (the entire interview is here, and well worth your time) and had this to say on the topic of teaching art:

"There's this stupid meme that goes around in the writing world which is... 'You can't teach writing and you can't teach art.'  This is a dumb thing to say, and here's why.  It's true that you can't teach art directly, but art is built on craft. ... You can't express yourself as an artist if you don't have a deep understanding of craft, and craft can be taught."

This reminded me greatly of something Grandmaster Park used to talk about.  He didn't call it craft; he called it steps.  He would say that learning steps was easy, but making art was very hard.  One day after watching my Jang Kwon he told me that my steps were as technically correct as they could be, and now I have to make art.  He said that only comes after years and years of practice.  Back then I didn't really understand what he was saying, and certainly it's possible that I still don't.  In the wake of this project, I think I understand him better now.  At the time, I was saddened thinking that he didn't want to teach me anymore.  In retrospect, that was ridiculous and I feel awfully foolish even typing that out.  Now I think that he was telling me that he had taught me the craft to the limit of what can be taught, and any improvement from there would have to be my own expression.

The difference between art and craft: Picasso's
Tête was made by cutting and pasting paper, not
because that was the limit of his craft, but
because that was his artistic choice.

Eisler goes on to say, "One of the ways that craft should be and can be taught and learned is pay attention to the art.  Experience it, enjoy it...  If you read a passage in a book and it blows you away for some reason... If you're just a reader, ... why would you want to pause to say 'why did this blow me away so much?'  But if you are a writer and you are trying to become a better writer, you might pause and say, '...this passage had a magical effect on me, but it's not real magic.'  There must be something that the writer is doing that created that effect, and there is.  There always is. ... You can definitely extract certain techniques by watching and thinking about what the other person is doing."  He goes into specific examples like appealing to multiple senses and juxtaposing nearby details against a wider view of the scene.  

He even ties it back specifically to martial arts, saying, "When you start asking yourself those questions, then you can start to see the craft behind the art, and the more conscious you become of craft, the more you can duplicate it yourself.  And it's true for anything.  It's true in martial arts, self defense… The first time someone does something to you, it feels like magic.  Like, 'Oh my God, how did you do that?  I'm on my butt!'"  Of course, it's not magic.  It's applied movement and biomechanics--things that can be learned.

I'm going to take it a step farther than he did, though. I'm going to claim that you can't teach art, and really you can't teach craft either. Even if you're the best martial arts instructor in the world, you can't really teach martial arts. All you can do is make it easy for someone to learn. Kris Wilder once told me that teaching is about helping people find something inside them that was already there, and he was so right. The student is the one who has to make the learning happen. The instructor can and should be a big part of that, but ultimately you can't make students learn, you can only let them learn.

That doesn't mean that if your students aren't learning it's not your fault.  It means that your job is a lot harder than it seems on the surface.

So how do you make something easy to learn? Of course you must have the skill you hope to impart, but mostly it comes down to creating the right experience for the students. A great instructor can optimize your training time, motivate you to push yourself, make it easy to grasp difficult concepts, keep you focused, balance the time you spend in the uncomfortable place, and make practice enjoyable enough to be continued. That is how craft is "taught," by effectively creating experiences that allow the students to learn.

Eisler's idea of analyzing art to learn craft has been at the front of the chaos in my mind over the course of this project. One thing that struck me is the thought that like writers, drummers and martial arts instructors are in the business of creating experiences.

Engaging Crowds, Classes and Individuals

First let's take a little break and watch Casey Grillo do a drum solo.  I interviewed him for this project and I'll introduce him properly in Part II, but for now just enjoy...

That was fun, but why? What exactly was he doing that got the audience to respond the way they did? These questions are perhaps too advanced for me. I'm at the level where any day that I don't hit myself with my sticks is a good day, so some things under the sun just aren't going to be understood. This video was taken at a Kamelot concert, in front of his own fans, and that probably meant the crowd was especially receptive to what he was doing. But I saw him subbing for another drummer in another band, and he got similar reactions out of Scott Rockenfield's fans.

Since I'm so far out of my depth on this one, I'm going to break this down in terms of what I already know about engaging people. I have taught martial art classes of a wide range of ages and experience levels, with students of varying degrees of physical wellness--sometimes all at once. I've also taught English as a second language to all ages and skill levels, and to several different languages of origin. That may seem like it requires a huge set of diverse skills (and in a way, it does) but ultimately it still comes down to reading the class and giving students the right experience so they can learn.

It's only a little different with a single student. Private lessons that are run like group classes tend to be awkward affairs. I like to allow for a more casual back-and-forth experience when I teach a single student, as that tends to be a great opportunity to create a very directed experience for exactly what that student needs. Certainly Kai teaches my drumming lessons that way as well.

When I create experiences, it's with fairly small groups. The biggest class I ever taught had about 45 people in it. That's small enough that I can speak loudly and clearly and be heard just fine. And that's good, because most of the tools in my bag rely on the spoken word. In the video, Casey is creating an experience for a much larger group using only percussive sounds and nonverbal cues. That's practically magic to me because the techniques are so different, but some of the broader ideas are the same.

Looking at these three scenarios, I notice four things in the video that are relevant to creating engaging experiences for crowds, classes and individuals. There may be others, but as I see it, an experience is most engaging when:

1. It is interactive. Getting people involved, whether they're clapping along with your drum solo, or seeing how hard they can kick a target, or bringing in their own songs to a drumming lesson, makes for a more engaging experience.

2. The pacing is good. One thing I notice about that drum solo is that he changes up what he's doing fairly often. It might be more impressive to pick the most challenging part and just do that continuously for four minutes, but that wouldn't be as engaging. Changing up the activity is extremely important in teaching as well. Not only does it keep people from getting bored, but it also makes it easier to learn because lessons sink in better if you break up your explanations with practice and vice versa.

3. It ends when it should. Grandmaster Park told me once that beginners' classes should be no more than 50 minutes. Any longer than that, and the training begins to drain on people and novices can leave with a sour taste in their mouths. But a 50-minute drum solo would probably be too long to be enjoyable. Likewise, a 4-minute martial arts class would be ridiculous.

4. It's about them. This might be my biggest pet peeve in martial arts. I've seen instructors who are incredible martial artists, but they fail as teachers because they don't make the classes about the students. They like being in charge, they like being the center of attention, or they like showing off--all of which are fine to enjoy, but if any one of those things is your priority, you will never be a good instructor. As an instructor, the only measure of your success is your students' success. Their experience. Not yours. I'll bet that a drummer who is focused on his own experience would also fall short of one who puts his audience first.

-

This series will be continued with 11 Ways Drumming Can Help Your Training: Martial Arts and Drumming Part II.

How to Train in Korea

Training in Korea has been an incredibly rewarding experience for me, but it took a long time of learning the hard way in order to get to this point.  This post is the resource I wish I had before I went to Korea the first time.  I hope someone finds it valuable.

That time I photobombed Grandmaster Park on the
front page of Taekwondo Times.

Figure out how you are going to get there.

Depending on your country of origin, the visa rules will be different.  For Americans, you can visit for 90 days with only a passport.  This is an expensive trip, so having a job waiting for you can help immensely.  If you are a native English speaker with a 4-year degree, you might be able to get a job teaching English.  If you do, your choices are 1-year contracts or 1-month camps.  There is nothing in between.  Keep in mind, though, that work visas can be tedious to obtain and the rules are always changing.  In some countries (including America) it can take several months to prepare all of the documents. It's not necessary to arrange your job through a recruiter, but it can be very helpful to do so the first time.

I introduced these guys to roleplaying games, riddles, mythology and fables, and
I guess I taught them some English, too.

Figure out where you are going to stay.

If you are traveling to Korea on a work visa, your employer will arrange your lodging.  For tourists, your options are hotels, goshiwons and homestays.  For a short visit, hotels will do just fine, but for longer stays they can be prohibitively expensive.  Goshiwons are miniature dorm rooms.  They are uncomfortable for very long-term stays, but if you are in Korea for only a month or so, this is a very cheap and serviceable way to go.  Homestays involve living with a family who can be a great resource for helping you make the most of your trip.

Know what you want to study.  

Before my first trip to Korea, I was told there was a taekwondo school on every street corner and it would be easy to find a place to train.  While this was a slight exaggeration, there were indeed about a dozen schools within walking distance of where I lived. However, I would not say that it was easy to find a place to train.

The schools that can be found on every street corner tend to cater to children.  While they will eagerly accept an adult student, it is likely to be a much more modern experience than you might expect.  It may be difficult to find one with an instructor who speaks English.  I trained at one of these schools for a year, and while I absolutely love the people I trained with, I can't recommend this option.  Modern taekwondo is a very prolific art--it is available all over the world.  If this is what you want to train, you are likely to get more from the experience at home, where you fluently share a language with your instructor.

The person in this picture who speaks the least English is my instructor.
The person in this picture who speaks the least Korean is me.

For adults who are serious about modern taekwondo, the best instruction is available through universities.  Taekwondo is the national sport of Korea and it is offered at many higher education schools, often as a major and sometimes in English.  Like any college or university back home, expect to go through an admissions process and enroll in the school like any other student.

If you are training in an art other than taekwondo, a university will likely not be an option and you should expect it to be a little harder to find a school.  For obscure arts, simply finding a school and signing up is the best, and perhaps the only, way to go.

Taekyun is one of those arts that is harder to find.

Traditional taekwondo is hard to find.  You will probably need to have a connection before you arrive in Korea.  In my case, I made my first connection by knowing my lineage and style's history.  When my Korean language skills grew to the point that I could surf the Internet in Korean a little bit, I found the correct Korean spelling of Park Chull Hee, who founded the style I learned in America.  I found a website that mentioned his name and had a map.  I couldn't understand anything else on the page and the automatic translators were no help, but I recognized the area in the map.  The next weekend, I took a few hours for a trip to that area and discovered a taekyun school.  It was closed.  But by pure luck, there was someone in the office who could help me.  Long story short, I now train at that taekyun school every chance I get, and they introduced me to Grandmaster Park, who I also train with every chance I get.  Every traditional martial arts connection I've made in Korea has come from them.

Which brings me to...

Have a contact ahead of time.  

Having a contact within your martial art is a huge help for making sure you get to study what you want to study.  Your time in Korea is a finite resource, and you don't want to spend it bumbling around trying to meet the right people.  Preparation is key.

It's also valuable to have a connection for day-to-day issues.  If you don't have an employer or at least a friend in Korea, you probably want to stay at a major hotel where the staff speaks English.  Any number of issues can come up when you're travelling, and having someone who can help you is invaluable.

Don't neglect your language skills.  

Especially if you are staying in Seoul, you can get by using only English.  Don't.

Your instructor probably will not speak a lot of English.  Those who can must still conduct their classes in Korean, translating for you only when time permits.  The more you understand, the more you will get out of your training.  Try asking your instructor for some vocabulary words that will help you understand the class.  Most will appreciate the effort.

Even if you are lucky enough to find an instructor who is fluent in English, I would recommend putting some serious time into learning Korean.  At the very least, learn the Korean alphabet before you arrive.  It's easy and extremely valuable.  Many of the signs are in English if you can just understand the letters.

I often say that I don't speak Korean, but that isn't completely true.  I'm not conversational, but I can make myself understood even in some unusual situations.  "My friend is drunk and lost" is not exactly covered in Level 1 textbooks, but being able to convey that to a security guard who spoke no English turned out to be a useful skill to have.

But besides the usefulness of being able to communicate, the biggest reason to work hard on learning Korean is the doors it will open for you.  Even when I have said completely wrong things, even accidentally offensive things, the people I spoke to recognized that I was making a genuine effort with the language and culture.  Being a foreigner who is willing to do that sets you apart from the tourists and straight-out-of-college expats who are just looking to have fun in a foreign country.  That kind of dedication is rare, and almost always appreciated.

Korean is not an easy language for native English speakers to learn, but there are a number of free resources.  I particularly like Talk To Me in Korean.

Be respectful of the culture.  

Never forget that you are a guest in this country.  This should go without saying, but sadly I've seen westerners behave in ways that made me cringe just being near them.  I've heard those same people complain of how mean and unfriendly Koreans are.  That has never been my experience.

I've found Koreans to be very kind and polite people.  They are incredibly helpful and forgiving of people who can't speak the language in a way no visitor to the United States could expect.  Once I was lost on the outskirts of Seoul.  I asked for directions in a convenience store, and the worker called her English-speaking daughter to help me understand what she was telling me.  They walked me to the bus stop and asked a man there to help me get on the right bus.  That man asked a passenger to help me get off at the right stop.  It became a community project to help the lost foreigner get to the right place.  I can't imagine that happening back home.

And I managed to get where I was going before dark.

Making just a little effort with the culture will go a long way.  Being rude will get you nowhere.  Don't be that guy.

Take notes.  

Especially for a short trip, you have a finite amount of time in Korea, so you want to get as much out of your training time as possible.  On my first stay in Korea, after my class with Grandmaster Park, I would write everything I could remember in a notebook during the bus ride home.  When I got home, I would type it in my martial arts journal.  This was great not only for creating a reference resource, but also for the process of recalling everything I was taught.

I still use my journal to record technical details, but videos are also incredibly helpful. Take videos if and only if your instructor is comfortable with it.  Your instructor might allow you to make a video but ask you to keep it private.  I have a dozen or so such videos that no one besides myself has ever seen, or ever will.  My instructors are trusting me to use it purely as my own reference and not as a representation of them or their style.

There are plenty of cafes where you can write notes after class.  This one has
a travel theme and some really good cappuccino.

Also be prepared for the likelihood that you will not have space to practice between classes.  Especially if you are in Seoul, space is at a premium and your options will be limited.  If you can't practice on your own, it becomes especially important to take notes and review them before the next class.

Be patient.  

It's tempting to think you need to cram in everything as quickly as possible, and you are right.  You need to make the most of your time.  But understand that on your first trip, your instructor doesn't really know you.  Cultivating that relationship takes time.

I've made several trips to Korea to train in taekyun, and each time I was greeted more warmly.  The first time, I was treated like a customer with a genuine interest in martial arts. They gave me a fast and interesting introduction to taekyun.  Most foreigners don't make it back for a second trip, so when I did, they treated me like a dedicated student and started outlining some long-term plans for me to continue my taekyun training.  Upon my third arrival, I was greeted with hugs and the attitude that since I was a regular now, I had better improve my skills considerably.

It's not fair to expect this kind of thing to develop overnight.  Most instructors in any country will respond to dedication, and Korea is no different.  Are you a serious martial artist, or a tourist who trains in martial arts?  It can be hard to tell the difference, so take the time and prove it.  You prove it by never missing a class, by training even when you are tired and jet-lagged, by diligently reviewing, and by keeping up the practice when you're not in Korea.  Serious martial artists know the drill--that's just how they operate.  Be patient and your instructor will see it.

Drink in moderation.

Drinking is part of the culture in Korea, but don't go overboard.  You're here to train, not get wasted.  Besides the negative impact that alcohol has on your physical performance, you've only got so much time in Korea.  Do you really want to spend it drunk and hung over?

A Buddha statue surrounded by "ten thousand Buddhas" at Kuknyeong Temple,
hidden away in the mountains.  You will never get there drunk.

Enjoy the adventure.

Sometimes people ask me for advice about teaching English in Korea.  I always tell them that if they're looking for an adventure, they're going to have a wonderful experience that they'll remember their whole lives, but if they're looking for a job they're going to be miserable.  Traveling or living in any foreign country will have its quirks and annoyances, and the longer you stay the more chance they have to get under your skin.  Nobody goes to Seoul for the crowded subway ride.  They tolerate the crowded subway ride for the adventure at the other end.

If you try to live like you do back home, with a western diet and western habits, it's difficult if not impossible.  Even if you do manage, it will be expensive and frustrating.  Eat your kimchi, try the thing that still looks like it did when it was alive, hang your wet clothes instead of trying to find a dryer, and always remember that what happens in a noraebang stays in a noraebang.

Things you can only do in Korea:  photo op at the Kimchi Museum.

This is a country with thousands of years of history and countless stories to tell.  Seoul exists firmly in the past and in the future--I've never seen any other place where you can be so completely surrounded by the height of technology and the modern world, but turn a corner and see something that has been there for hundreds of years or more.  You can't spend every minute training, so take some time to experience the culture.