Teaching Karate

Teaching Karate, (or anything), appears an easy thing to do when one sees it done by an experienced teacher. However, I recently discovered the difficulty of it(which my last post breifly refers to).....

For a start, it required me to understand karate in a different way, challenging the understanding I already had. In training, I was pieceing together karate: learning new tecniques, working on mistakes, understanding how they could be used against an attacker, developing my own opinions and views about karate, understanding karate's philosiphy, etc...  While teaching, I have to break karate down, which is the reverse of what I am familliar with in  training. It envolves taking apart the different aspects of the tecniques I'd previously been putting together; working on mistakes, understanding and all. As for my own personal views on karate, my conscience would never let me impose them on other karateka, teaching open-mindedly and not letting my own opinions influence it also proves difficult. This is as a result of the fact that, naturally, my views do affect my training; because it's, yet again, in reverse to what I'm used to. You might've expeienced something similar to this, or maybe teaching just comes naturally to  you? Or maybe you've never had to teach? If the latter is true, then don't let this put you off because you learn so much from teaching Karate(I imagine it becomes easier with experience as well).

Several times, I've heared the saying, 'First know yourself , then know others'. The definition seems to be something along the lines of: ' Defeat your enternal opponents before any external ones' . What does defeating  any kind of opponent envolve? Identifying strengths and weaknesses seems to be a significant part of it(what you do as a result of that idetification might depend on the kind of opponent confronting you). This saying, I think, also applies in teaching. In training, you discover what you find most difficult (kicks, in my case!), and what's easier for you. Overtime , strengths and weaknesses become apparent  and the mistakes you make as a result of them alongside it; you know yourself. Later on in your training, ('...then know others'), when you start teaching, you have to identify the mistakes of other karateka, strengths and weaknesses might become apparent to you as a result of the mistakes, ( it often works in revese, remember?), you then know others.

Of course, there is far more to teaching karate than identifying mistakes. I'd give examples if I knew how to word them. Yet mistakes in themselves can be complex and  interlinked, something I will elabourate on in my next post.