In the United States, it seems we’ve developed a lazy, backwards way of thinking about education. We go to a teacher and expect them to bestow knowledge upon us. We take their class so they can copy information from their brain onto ours like it was a hard drive. When that doesn’t work, and it never does, we blame the teacher.

But when we fail to get the knowledge or skill we were chasing, the real failure is identifying the teacher. The teacher isn’t that person standing at the front of the classroom giving a lecture. The real teacher is repetition.

Teacher can tell you over and over again to do X. But it’s only after you’ve performed that action countless times you realize, “Hey! I need to do X!”

The real job of a teacher is to guide you. They set you on a path to make the discovery yourself. That discovery is the moment when you say “Oh! That’s what she meant!” The teacher already told you, but you didn’t internalize it until you had enough personal experience and repetitions to discover it from the inside out.

In martial arts, you feel the movement from the inside. The more you do it, the more you notice. Once you start hitting the basics, then you start noticing smaller and smaller details. You can tell how many repetitions someone has performed of a certain technique based on the level of detail they’re aware of.

Boang Sao is my teacher. Chung Chuie is my teacher. Jab-Cross is my teacher. Corkscrew Parry is my teacher. Triangle Step is my teacher…