Learn How To Learn
“Believe nothing. No matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.”—Buddha.
When I instruct, I suggest to my students to pay close attention but to avoid trusting my teaching on faith alone.
Why do I urge them to not blindly trust my information? First, because they, not me are most responsible for their education, Further, I believe the best teachers are mentors who lead with suggestions, not dogma to inspire students to teach themselves.
It’s not realistic to expect that students will live in a vacuum of information because we all have easy accessibility with few barriers. Tennis instruction is a prime example of such availability, and while this access can be a potential wealth of information, let’s not forget that one person’s trash is another person’s treasure. It seems that when it comes to tennis information many feel that they are not only entitled to their own opinions , but also to their own facts with unsupported imperatives that when questioned don’t provide an explanation but do provoke an attack on the inquiry. Such passion without purpose is poisonous.
Here’s a case in point of information that is a mile wide but an inch deep; “the power imparted to the ball is all about racket speed.”
This is a mantra of tennis physics misinformation that has been repeated so many times many coaches and students accept it as gospel, despite this concept countering basic high school physics.
The display of Power in movement is “the ability to exert force in the shortest amount of time” so speed which reduces time matters, but force is mass times acceleration so the mass of the racket and changes in velocity also matter.
The imparting of power is the convergence of all of these factors at the highest point and as we know in this and other mathematical equations like it, no one independent variable is deserving of more attention than the other.
If I ask students to “listen to me and forget what others say” I would be doing exactly what I object with. So rather than asking students to trust me and to reject others information, I ask them to question and seek out the most credible independent resources as my ultimate goal is to emancipate them from blind reliance by guiding them in the process of solving problems.
This starts with the recognition that the process of learning tennis mechanics, strategies and tactics while straightforward, requires active participation, effort and diligence:
Here is a progression of that process:
- First, seek to analyze information to understand if it reinforces or conflicts with what you know of the world.
- Next, carefully and critically watch highly skilled players to help uncover similarities and differences in movements and compare and contrast these.
- Finally based on the first two steps, discover which movements are uniquely suitable for you.
- Based on following these steps find more questions and ask them.
- Then repeat steps 1 to 4.
It is imperative to recognize that practice doesn’t make movements and point construction perfect, it makes them permanent, so before investing years into reinforcing a technique or strategy that may be highly flawed, take the time and effort to learn the critical thinking skills that are the path to understanding performance development. Immature players want to win the battle, wise coaches teach them to win the war. Inexperienced coaches tell a player how to act. Wise coaches build trust and loyalty by showing them how to act.
Simply: Assess before you progress.
