As an instructor, that seems like an odd thing to say. Well, unless you are one of the more sadistically motivated instructors, which I am not. Arguably, I lack a degree of compassion, but sadistic, I am not. I don’t care enough about the students to be cruel; I care about the School. So why make such a statement?
Sometimes I will introduce a new technique or concept into a class and the yudansha pick it up almost instantly, as if they had done it many times before. So it seems neither new nor challenging. ‘Where is the learning in that?’, one wonders.
But then the mudansha try. And they struggle.
They have an intellectual grasp of the concept, but fail to physically translate it.
Why is this good?
Because it shows that our training methodology works.
It takes a lot of time and effort to reach the senior levels, the process is slow, but deep. Once you reach a certain level of understanding, though, little is really new, it is just various forms of henka ho.
Without the contrast of the struggling white belts, it can be difficult to see just how far the black belts have progressed.
Kai Cho