Episode 925 - 2 Schools of Thought: Show All on Testing vs Just New
In this episode, Jeremy and Andrew tackle their next topic in their new series: 2 Schools of Thought. They take a topic and look at 2 different ways to do it, exploring pros and cons of both.
Show All on Testing vs Just New: 2 Schools of Thought - Episode 925
SUMMARY
In this episode, Jeremy and Andrew discuss the two schools of thought when it comes to martial arts testing. Should students be required to show everything they've learned since day one, or just the material they've learned since their last test? They explore the pros and cons of each approach and share their own perspectives. The conversation also touches on the importance of forms, the progression of rank, and the goals of a martial arts school.
TAKEAWAYS
* There are two schools of thought when it comes to martial arts testing: showing everything learned since day one or just the material learned since the last test.
* The decision on which approach to take depends on the goals and curriculum of the martial arts school.
* Forms play a significant role in testing, and their importance varies depending on the school and rank.
* Rank progression should bring students closer to the defined goals of the advanced ranks.
* There is no one right way to approach martial arts testing; it's about finding what works best for the students and the school.
CHAPTERS
00:00 Introduction
01:12 2 Schools of Thought: Cumulative vs. Recent Material in Martial Arts Testing
14:22 Rank Progression: Bringing Students Closer to Advanced Goals
21:25 Conclusion
After listening to the episode, it would be exciting for us to know your thoughts about it.
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Show Transcript
Jeremy (00:08.134)
Welcome to another episode of Whistlekick, martial arts radio, the world's number one traditional martial arts podcast. And we're not the one making that claim. We're just agreeing with it. So thanks.
If you're new, thanks for being here. Today, Andrew and I have a format that some of you really like, two schools of thought. We're gonna bat back and forth the idea of, at a martial arts test, should you be showing all of the stuff you've learned cumulatively at that test, or you should only be showing the stuff that you have been required to learn since your last test? Did I set that up well? Yeah, okay, yep.
Hang around, we're gonna talk about it. We'll give you the pros and cons as we see it. And of course, as always, we invite your commentary. If you're new to what we do, please start at whistlekick .com, see all the things that we do, because what we do is so much bigger than this show. We have martial arts radio. We have a book division. We host events. We sponsor martialjournal .com. We have training programs. We have apparel. We sell protective equipment.
Jeremy (02:05.67)
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Why do we do all these things? It's a lot of different things. Why do we do it? Because we believe martial arts brings out the best in people. And we believe that if we continue to deliver wonderful things to the martial arts world, that more people will train. And we want everyone in the world to train. In fact, we want everyone, everyone, everyone to train for at least six months because we think that is the easiest way that we can make a positive impact globally.
So please support us in our mission to get everyone to do so. And we appreciate those of you who make contributions, whether that's through the Patreon or other ways. Thanks for being here. And thank you for sharing some time with us. All right, Andrew, this testing thing, this was, you put this on the list, so I'll let you start. So the thought, I don't know that this was put on.
I put it on the list in terms of I typed it into my phone, but I may have gotten this from someone else. So I don't want to... Stealing other people's great ideas. I solicited from other people. Solicited other people's great ideas? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Just as an aside, if you have an idea for a guest or an episode, the best thing to do is email this guy right here, andrew at whistlekick .com. Yep. And so the thought was...
in your martial arts school let's say they're going for a middle belt rank whatever that is in your school like if you've got 10 ranks before black belt somewhere in the four or five range you're having a test
Jeremy (03:54.182)
the thought would be in this episode, Two Schools of Thought, should that person be, let's say this is their fifth test, okay? Should they be required to show everything from their first test up until now, everything they've learned from day one all the way through, or Two Schools of Thought, just show the stuff that they've had to learn since their last test. Yeah.
So those are the two sides of the coin. And I feel very strongly about both options. Okay. You feel strongly about both options, meaning yes on one and no on the other, or yes on yes? Yes on yes. Yes and yes. Interesting. Okay. Here's why. Here's where my initial yeses are. Okay. Yes, you should be showing everything because if it's important enough to know at one point, it's important enough to continue to know and refine.
Yes to the only the new stuff because we can assume or we should be able to assume that martial artists are keeping up on their training of the other things on their own but also in a properly structured martial arts class and we want to devote more time to assessing the newer material because if someone gets the...
older material quote wrong, are we going to demote them? That's a good question. Yeah. I feel, I pretty much feel the same way. But I also, we have to get an argument going on. I lean a little bit more towards, believe it or not, having thought about this, a little bit more towards just showing the new stuff. That surprises me. A little bit. Yeah. And my,
One of the things you said helped lead me, push me over the edge there a little bit, is that all of the...
Jeremy (05:56.614)
This will be easier to describe with numbers. Okay, right. So You've learned your form one, two, three, four. You're now you're learning you just learned your fifth form. You're gonna test I'm just using this forms as an example When you test Showing forms one, two, three four and now number five is Number one gonna be as good as number five That's the question that I would pose
and the answer might be yes, but it might be no because I spent so much time working on this new one they haven't worked on one through four, but in class I would assume they're still working on one through four. Hopefully, right? You know, in class the instructor is still working these other forms so they're still going through them.
But if they've been putting all of their energy into learning this new stuff, and it gets even more difficult when you start going up to third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth. I was saying that this becomes much more difficult at the higher. At higher. For sure. Which is why a lot of higher rank tests are significantly longer. Yep. But then my question would be, do they need to be? But that's a different two schools of thought.
But those first couple forms they learned, why did they, what is in my head, what is the rationale for learning them? Well, it's just learning them how to move, how to get the body to stick from point A to point B, like how to manipulate their hands and do certain things. Well, by the time they're a middle rank learning, going on through their fifth test or whatever.
They've already learned those things. Do I really need them to know that form to be as good as the hard one that they're learning now? They've gotten, and this is me playing doubles out here, but they've gotten from those forms what I wanted them to get from them. And they already just now inherently have the principle that I wanted them to get from it. So do I really need that form to be as good as everything, the new stuff? That's the question.
Jeremy (08:01.958)
If you've spent time in a typical martial arts school, take the testing piece out of it. As you spend more time, let's, you know, forms one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. As you spend more time and as form two is likely more complex than one, five is more complex than four. In theory, yeah. Usually works out that way. Yeah.
you are becoming a better martial artist from both the complexity and your time in and without even approaching it in this way, Form 1 does generally get better just because you're better doing it. And so you could make that assessment to say this is what needs to happen here.
at some point, and I don't know if we want to talk more first, but this was one of the things that came up when I devised the curriculum for my school, and it kind of hybrids the two. Interesting. So, and I guess I'll say it now. So, students learn the entire curriculum.
we might be making a small change on that by moving some concepts in to later ranks. They've learned everything they are going to learn with the exception of forms happens by the time they're yelled at. We have 25 techniques, they learn how to spar, they learn their first form for yelled at, done. There are no additional techniques they have to learn.
but they have to be able to do those techniques better. And we haven't codified what that means. So to go for blue belt, you have to know, for yellow belt, you have to learn form one at level one. For blue belt, you have to bring form one to level two and form two is at level one. So it continues to stack. Yep. Yep.
Jeremy (10:00.262)
I see. So we're facilitating that progress in there. Now, what is interesting, this kind of supports what I've said. We've recently had, the school's still very new. We've had two students test for Bluebell. Therefore, the version of level one for their form two was better than their level one for form one because they are better martial artists now. Which is what you would expect to see. And just for...
for the audience, level one is can you do it right in a way that you can do it on your own? So I can say go home and practice that. That's really all level one is, is that you can stumble your way through and it kind of looks right. Level two is you've added some refinement, there's some speed, there's some power, there's some timing. It looks okay, it looks pretty good. That's level two. And so I'm thinking about the way these two students performed their second form.
And it was way beyond what level one has to be. Yeah. Yeah. So.
moving forward eventually we'll go all the way up to level well I'll go up to form five yeah so when they're learning form five they should also be getting form one at a level five yeah so at their test they still have to show it they have to show showing everything they have to show everything so your school is definitely leaning towards the one side of your test you have to show everything and that all the reason I can I can so clearly make this this
decision is because I wanted a smaller curriculum. Sure. And there are schools out there that go the exact opposite. They want a huge curriculum. They want to offer their students as much as possible because they want to give them, it's the difference between I want, you know, snap -on tools in my toolbox versus I'm gonna take that same money and I'm gonna deck out my whole garage with
Jeremy (12:05.638)
you know, the cheap generic tools from big lots. Yeah, yeah. Right? Hopefully that analogy plays out. I think so. Okay. But I'm thinking back to other schools, right? It's easier for me to think when I was a student at other schools and how I did this. And what happened as kind of a, I don't think a hybrid, but a compromise.
Because again, length of test is relevant. Some schools, you've got multi -day tests. Some schools, it's, you know, you show up at 10 a and we'll tell you when it's time to go. But some schools have an endpoint because maybe they're renting a space or maybe somebody has a job or maybe it's a child or whatever. We would be threatened in Taekwondo. We might be asked anything.
but we did not show everything. Gotcha, yeah. You know, sometimes it was random, sometimes it was our choice, sometimes it was certain people on the testing board saying, you know, maybe they looked through our last testing sheets. I see here you had trouble with this form last time. Let me see if you do it any better now. Yep, okay, interesting. I get that, I see that. As you progress and you become further along on your journey,
If the if you're expected to show everything the test will naturally take longer because you're gonna have more material to know right so in my as an example I would give in my show to Khan school the rank just before black belt you had eight forms you had to know and then when you went from black belt you had two more so when you touch for black belt you had ten forms you had to know and For Needon you had an extra two and I had twelve and when I went for sand on I had another two five fourteen forms
that I had to be able to do. And I'm not gonna say I couldn't do all of them because in our test we had to. We had to do one, he did a pre -test which got a lot of the stuff out of the way. But I would imagine the pre -test was the stuff that was considered all but automatic.
Jeremy (14:21.862)
So the pre -test were basically the first eight forms. The stuff that there's just no way you should be flubbing this. So in the Shotokan school, we would have been Heian, one, two, three, four, and five. The first Heian or Hinan or Pinan or Pinyon, whatever your school calls them. But those first five, those first five forms, I did not work on them for my Shodan test.
Partly because yeah, I just knew them but I may very well have made some mistakes in them because they weren't things I was working on because the forms from my black belt test were way more important. They were certainly a lot more difficult. You've got a finite amount of time and energy to allocate towards your training. Correct. And this ultimately this comes down to a philosophy in a school as to where one should allocate that those resources of time and energy. Yeah, exactly. And so.
I think there's a lot to be said for allowing your students like, yes, you have to know these things. And obviously, if you've gotten up to this rank, you obviously knew those things. But if you are able to really focus on the new stuff, it allows that stuff to be that much better because you're not being forced to work on.
the putting this in air quotes, simple stuff, the early stuff. Notice how I didn't say not important stuff. It's still important to learn. So that's just another way of thinking of it.
What's interesting to me is if we take forms and we put forms aside for a moment, everything else is building on everything else in the way that you might see it in an academic track. Right? If you go from class 101 to 102 to 103 to 104, most of the time, if you went from 101 to 104, you're going to need the stuff that you would have had in 102 and 103. Yeah, that's right. If you go from white belt to yellow belt to brown, red, black,
Jeremy (16:25.822)
belt Forms aside you're still probably going to be lost you're not going to be performing those techniques at the level you Would be required to or expected to you're not going to have the concepts whatever those might be in that school that there is a reason for this progression and I'm sure we could come up with examples of schools that don't do it that way or You know do that poorly
But it really, its forms are that different thing because there's the memorization there. And I love forms, I think.
Most people out there know I really love forums. But when it comes to an academic setting, I hate memorization. Yeah, I don't think there's a lot of value there because and there are plenty of people who, you know, they struggle on tests or they struggle at memorizing things, but they understand the concepts, right? This might be that delineation of someone's really good at implementing the material. They're a great fighter. And then you have other people who are great at their forms, you know, and this is one of the things that I think we both love about martial arts.
is you can maybe specialization isn't the right word, but you might have aspects that you love more than others and that's where you can hopefully spend. Yeah, there's a place for everybody depending on what they want to really work on. No, I would agree with that for sure. I think I think I'm confident in saying there's no one way that is better.
I think like so many things that we talk about on here, it comes down to how do you run your school? How is your school run? What are the goals? What is the curriculum? What is the definition of that advanced rank, whether or not it's black belt or whatever, right? There's some definition that is being worked towards and as long as...
Jeremy (18:19.366)
the rank progression brings you closer to that, I think it's great. Yeah, I agree. I don't think any one way is right or any one way is wrong. I think that I want people that listen to this or watch this episode who have a say in this, right? Obviously, you know, there will be a lot of students listening to this that don't necessarily have a say, but... But you have a say on what you practice. Correct. But, you know, hopefully it gives you something to think about. Things that make you go, hmm.
for senior hall reference.
Jeremy (19:00.358)
Is that it? Yeah, I mean, I would love to hear from the audience. Yeah, what does your school do? You know, is it a?
All or nothing sort of thing. You have to do everything or is it just the stuff you most recently and I'd love to hear from other people. I think the other piece I'd like to know about in there is are things weighted? Right. For example, you know, I gave I mentioned, well, you know, people rarely get demoted. So if you're expected to know your beginner material as an intermediate rank and you don't know your beginner material.
Do you automatically fail the test? Is it a pre -test environment where, you know, I know some schools that they'll run kind of that pre -test or I've heard it described as maintenance testing?
Where you've got to show that you continue to know these things at higher ranks and there are so many ways of doing this And i'd love to know more. We'd both love to know more about how your school does that. So let us know How do you do that? You can email us andrewatjeremy at whistlekick .com You can Hit us up on social media at whistlekick You can find where this episode was posted both at whistlekickmarshallhortsradio .com as well as on the facebook group Marshallhorts Radio
all great options. You could send us a carrier pigeon. My dog might not like that. Send me the carrier pigeon. Yeah. If you want to engrave things on some homemade dog treats, they could go to you. Care of Daisy. I think they'd be too Daisy care of you. Okay, sure. Unless you're going to eat them. If they're made really well, maybe.
Jeremy (20:45.99)
There's some solid dog biscuit choices out there now, made with people food. Yeah.
And if people can't eat it, should you really be fitting it to your dog? Good point. I appreciate you being here. Thanks for spending some time with us today. If you have a suggestion for a guest or a topic, please let Andrew know. Andrew at Whistlekick .com. Thanks for your support. Thanks for doing all you do to help us do what we do. We appreciate it. Until next time, train hard, smile, and have a great day.
Jeremy (21:25.19)
Ha ha ha ha!