Part of what may be bringing you frustration is that you have a male teacher trying to relate extremely advanced concepts in a male fashion.
To me, kata are reference books and not story books. Yakusoku kumite aren't self-defense exercises; they are opportunities to engage in kinetic exploration. At some point, you need to get off the damned lesson plan and run with the material. At some point, you need to drop the specifics and see the underlying principles. If it was easy to do, everyone would be doing it.
Why do you think Van and I pull our hair out when we see this mind-numbing practice of "advanced teachers" doing stupid-simple futzing in Sanchin? To us, that's just bad teaching. Sanchin is a means to an end, and not an end unto itself.
At my work, we had a practice in model-building that we called "futzing." Basically you build a statistical model, see if it violates your principles, constrain it where it does, re-fit the model, see if it violates your principles, constrain it where it does, etc., etc. until all parts of the model follow your underlying principles. When all is said and done, you have a cost prediction model that won't predict less cost if you evolve to a more serious stage of a disease. That's an important constraint, because we don't want to penalize doctors for having sicker patients, and possibly incent them to code less information. More information (and more specific information) should always result in predicting equal or higher cost - even if the "R-square" of the model is ever so slightly worse. Arriving at the final result is an iterative process. Anyhow... we're always looking to find ways to communicate our geek-talk to our lay customers.
So one day I look up the word futz. And do you know what it means? Let's start with the origin of the word. It is a combination of fuking and putz. Putz is yiddish for penis. Hmm... Not such a good way to describe what we were doing.
Then we get to the actual meaning.
To waste time or effort on frivolities; fool. Often used with around:
Hmm...
You see... to Van and I, these "advanced" instructors were futzing. What we believe instructors should be doing is measuring all that we do against a small set of important principles, and make sure we aren't violating those principles. In doing so, we should be free to drift from a stiff, robotic norm - so long as we don't violate the principles of our art.
More so, a cadre of us (George included) believe it is our DUTY to take this Uechi ball and run with it. But how do you actually TEACH someone to do that? Well... one way is to create a kinetic "play" environment where we can try stuff out and learn by trial and error. That's a very yang way of doing things. Another way is to survey what others are doing and try to synthesize an encyclopedia of cool things to do. That's a very yin way of doing things.
Ideally as a dojo, we do both. But individually we must contribute based on our strengths. That means that at some point, Vicki must "go it alone" and bring stuff to the table. No more spoonfeeding. We give you the paintbrush, the canvas, and the paints, and tell you to "just do it." Then we look at what was done.
That's some scary schit!
- Bill
