Zyaga Writing about whatever the hell I want, cuz it's the Interwebz!

Effective Teacher/Sifu/Sensei

Everyone tends to question whether certain Martial Arts are truly effective or not, but the biggest problem isn’t whether the Martial Art is effective or not. It is whether the Sensei, who will be teaching you, is effective or not. I’m simply going to use the word Sensei as the representation for teacher, Sifu, etc for the rest of this article.

It’s one of those things where it doesn’t matter if someone has or hasn’t told you about them, you simply know that they are a great and effective teacher. They may teach the same content as everyone else, but the way they teach it, the methods they choose to use to demonstrate things, etc all add to together in unison and it no longer matters what anyone else says about that person because you now have your own well opinionated outlook on that person and their teaching methods. It’s a wonderful thing when it happens. Too bad it doesn’t happen more often. However, I got lucky, and over this past weekend I got to have this experience again. I’m not going to mention a name, because I don’t know that persons views on having it listed, so I’ll stray away from that since it really shouldn’t matter anyway. All I will say is that the Sensei is a woman.

The class began like normal, with around 10-15 people having attended, where we would stretch our muscles and ligaments as to not injure them later on. But as class further progressed, I noticed when practicing various things, that she made the class feel quite at ease, at least for me. I no longer cared what the others were doing next to me, because I was fixed on doing the things she said to the best of my ability. I’ll admit, Aikido is a big change for me, so I’m definitely a beginner all over again in a lot of areas and to be honest, I love it.

Later on, we were divided into basically two groups: the more advanced and the newcomers. The class was a beginner class but many higher ranked students attend to work on the fundamentals( and have fun ). When we got to the point where we were working in pairs, attempting to perform the technique she had just showed us, Sensei would come around and correct us. It wasn’t the fact that Sensei corrected us, it was the way she did it. Sensei made it very easy to understand and break down each movement into pieces. At one point, Sensei was demonstrating the move on me for my practice partner(nage) to see how he should put me(uke) down in a pin. The flow of her movements took me down effortlessly(on her part of course ). When Sensei got me into the pin, she was able to demonstrate the slight difference of not having your knees close enough to the uke’s shoulders and the result of that difference AKA me auto-flinching in response to the sudden torque generated. I may not have much Aikido experience, but I’ve had enough Martial Arts background training to notice when someone is effortlessly performing techniques.

Obviously, you can’t really describe all that well how, what, and why that Sensei is so great at teaching, because you just have to be there to experience it for yourself. But, for those who have had the chance to train with people that make you feel like this, you’ll understand what I mean. It’s not what they teach, it’s how they teach it.