When Being Told the Right Way Gets in the Way of Learning——Learning Tai Chi, Teaching Art
Updated: Oct 2
A few months ago, my Tai Chi teacher noticed a problem with the way I was practising. What interested me later was that he chose not to correct it.
I had learnt much of the traditional Yang-style 85 form from a video before I began studying with Sam, so almost every movement needed work. I wanted as much correction as I could get. Whenever Sam corrected something in my practice, I felt I had come away with treasure. I would go over his corrections in my mind again and again, trying to reinforce the new learning.
Sam, however, did not seem nearly as concerned about correcting everything as I was. In class, he would spend considerable time taking us through simple qigong and body exercises to loosen the body instead of focusing on correction. He also told me that I did not need to deliberately change my form at this stage; if I kept learning and practising, some things would come naturally.
I understood this conceptually. Still, I felt a greater sense of progress after a class when I had the chance to have Sam correct my movements. I was eager to reach the point where I could work through the forms with the confidence of a more advanced practitioner.
At the last class of the term, Sam was helping another student with a movement and used my way of doing it as a comparison. He said to us, “Faye does this movement quite well, but she does it a little too much. I don’t have a problem with that, though.”
My immediate thought was: Why hadn’t he told me sooner? I had no idea I was overdoing it. If I had known, surely I could simply have toned it down.
So, over the next couple of weeks, I made an effort during home practice not to overdo the movements. But as I worked on it, Sam’s comment that he “didn’t have a problem with that” began to make sense. Because I had taught myself much of the form, I had spent the previous two months trying to correct movements my body had already learnt in the wrong way. I was keen to improve, so when Sam taught me a different way of doing something, I practised it very deliberately: where the hand should be, how far the arm should extend, where the weight should go. Inevitably, some of those corrections became exaggerated.
But perhaps that exaggeration had a purpose. I was still trying to establish the new movement in my body. Doing it a little too much was part of learning it. With practice, the movement could gradually find its own flow. Only then did I see why Sam had told me not to focus too much on changing my form.
It also occurred to me that Sam had noticed my tendency to overdo things long before the last class. He had once described my Tai Chi as “very expressive”. Because he understood where I was in the learning process, he did not turn it into another problem for me to fix. Had he told me then to be more natural, I suspect I would simply have added “natural” to my growing list of instructions and worked very hard at it. I might have ended up trying to perform naturalness before I had lived through the stage that allowed it to become embodied.
This brought me back to a broader question about teaching and learning. Some things can be explained and understood immediately. Others need to be experienced before they become part of the way a person moves, thinks or sees. Good teaching involves knowing when knowledge will serve the learner, when it may get in the way, and when to leave room for experience.
The same question arises in art education.
Children’s thinking, perception and hand–eye coordination are still developing. If we focus on the “correct” way too early, some children can become so concerned with getting it “right” that they lose the freedom to begin. Some become frustrated when they cannot make what they have been shown and gradually lose confidence or interest.
Others, through intensive training or simply because they are good at reproducing what they see, may become highly proficient at it. From the outside, this can look like clear progress. Yet being good at reproducing what they have been shown is not the same as developing their own response. When you look at this kind of artwork, you can see what has been taught: the technique, the composition and sometimes even the teacher’s own aesthetic, but much less of what has come from the child.
Something of a person always enters what they do. Bodies are different. So are temperament, age, physical condition, cultural and family background, sensibility, life experience and understanding. Much of this develops slowly, through living and doing. In art, this is part of how a personal artistic style takes shape. Children taught by the same teacher should not necessarily end up making the same kind of work.
The same is true in Tai Chi. The same form can be passed down through a lineage, yet each practitioner gradually settles into a way of moving that is their own. Over time, these differences become part of how a tradition develops into different forms.
In Tai Chi, learning more forms in less time can look like progress. In art, producing technically impressive work quickly can do the same. The difficulty is that some of the development we most want from education is slow, personal and difficult to demonstrate.
This is part of why teaching for the development of the whole person is difficult to sustain. Parents want to see progress, teachers need to demonstrate achievement, and providers need to show the value of what they offer. Over time, what can be demonstrated most easily can become what teaching is organised around.
Perhaps the more useful question is not simply, “How much has this child learnt?”
It is: What is developing in this child through learning art?
That is a question worth keeping open.
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