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Berger, Arthur Asa—Lessons Learned from My Tai Chi Master Page 2
Exchanges: The On-line Journal of Teaching and Learning in the CSU
New Approaches to Teaching a Very Old Exercise
What was interesting about the course was that Bob, the Tai Chi "master," continually was trying new things, even after twenty years of teaching. Tai Chi is traditionally taught by having the teacher show a move, and asking the students to imitate the move. The teacher then goes around, making sure that the students are in the correct position—with their feet placed just so, with each arm and hand where it should be, with the waist pointing in the right direction and with the backbone straight. One of Bob's assistants, Tom, spent fifteen years studying Tai Chi with Bob and still made some mistakes doing the form, which shows that Tai Chi is very difficult to do correctly.
But Bob kept trying new ways of teaching each move. He tried to reduce each movement to its fundamentals and produced charts that show where each foot goes, how the waist is positioned, what the arms are doing, and so on. He did this because he thought that taking something that is very complicated and breaking into smaller and more manageable units, he could teach step by step; he would help his students learn better. Bob did whatever he could to take this incredibly complicated exercise and cut it down to size, so to speak, so his students didn't feel it was beyond their capacities and would be impossible for them to learn.
He took what might be described as a hyper-mechanistic tack, taking a martial art that is very fluid when it is performed, and breaking it into its most elemental components. I told him that he was doing a Lévi-Straussian thing. Just as Lévi-Strauss had broken myths into their smallest components, "mythemes," so he could understand how myths communicated to people, Bob was trying to break Tai Chi into its most basic components, what we might call "Tai Chi-emes." By teaching his students how to do each segment of a move correctly, Bob hoped to help his students learn the moves and, eventually, the whole form.
There is also something to be said for adopting somewhat of a casual attitude towards Tai Chi (and perhaps any subject). A former student of mine, from twenty years ago, was also in the class. (She was nice enough to say "you haven't changed in twenty-five years.") She became passionate about Tai Chi, took private afternoon classes with Bob and was all wrapped up in it. "This is very, very important to me," she said one night. The alarms went off in my head.
"Be careful," I told her. "You'll probably burn out." And a few months later, burn out she did. At a class meeting she told me she was fed up with Tai Chi, wasn't satisfied with her progress, and didn't seem to be getting anywhere. I suggested she drop her afternoon class. It was "too much of a good thing" and she had, quite naturally, become tired and even mildly depressed about the course. She soon stopped doing any Tai Chi.
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