Black Belts and teaching
Michele over at Just a Thought has kind of started a meme with a recent post about whether black belts need to teach. A number of other blogs have chimed in a bit.
It has always been the policy at our dojang that the adult and older teen black belts help out in some way with teaching. The beginner and intermediate classes are normally broken down into smaller groups after the entire class bows in and warms up together. The advanced classes aren’t usually subdivided. Each class has a primary instructor who is responsible for the planning of the class and either running it or delegating all or part of it to other instructors. The primary instructor breaks down the class into groups and gives the group instructor their plan for the class.
It is a system that works well for us. Prior our Grandmaster passing away, the Primary’s duties more often just involved running the warmup and then the Grandmaster would break down the class and create the plan for the day. So perhaps now we’re less connected class-to-class; I’m not always sure what the other instructors have worked on recently, so I’m creating my plans a bit in isolation. But quality has still remained high, so I know we’re doing lots of things right.
Back to the original point — all adults and near-adults are expected to help out either as a Primary or as an assistant instructor. And I think that is a very important thing for black belts to do. As a student, you are focusing on your own training. Hopefully you are also paying attention to what others are doing, right or wrong. But the process of teaching others really crystallizes your understanding of what you are doing.
In my mind, a black belt is defined by what they know, not necessarily how proficient they are at doing things themselves. I’ve trained with too many black belts that I respect but have physical limitations to equate being able to beat people up with being a good martial artist. To me, progressing in knowledge requires teaching at the black belt level. Yes, there are still plenty of new things to learn at that point, but teaching helps give a much deeper understanding of what you are doing and why than you can get as just a student. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve felt confident of my knowledge but then realize when I’m teaching that I’m actually confused by something.
So, I’d have to agree that in a traditional martial arts setting that teaching should be required.