Excellent articles, Will. Thank you for posting them. There is no question that people learn Flycasting (and everything else) differently and it’s nice to know that these channels may be a red herring.
With regards thinkers/feelers (I assume Engineers/Poets?) I’ve also had problems with this because when it comes to engineers I’ve often felt that the answer was to teach them how to learn poetry. With regards poets then I still think it’s poetry
I have one maybe interesting contribution to styles and teaching methods. When I first started teaching I had read PMP’s Fly Casting Handbook and then - being naive and innocent - promptly thought that this was the way to cast. Shortly after this I met Mel Krieger and realised that it probably wasn’t
I had gone from untrained to “thumb on a curtain rail” to “puller”. Pulling was pretty exciting stuff back then.
But there is a certain type of gentlemen. He is a sergeant major or a city lawyer or a merchant banker - unless he also plays squash in which case he is excluded. And for some reason if you try to teach them pulling and feel it’s going to be a long and unsuccessful lesson. However, teach them PMP’s thumb on a curtain rail and bingo, the guy can cast! I don’t know why.
Mel was right about one thing however; if you can really connect with your student you are going to get great results. I think this comes back to being apes. Mime, mimic, copying coupled with practise games and hands-on experiments, reinforced with analogies that can then be used later to recall the feeling of when it works - this is all very basic learning techniques that work at a very primitive level. And for them to work subliminally you need trust.
For me personally as a coach it’s about having a eye for body movement and then finding ways to mould that into greater efficiency. It’s truly quite fascinating. I’m really fortunate at the moment having this tie between very challenging fishing casting and guiding for jungle fish, which is giving me repeat customers. I’ve never had a core base of repeat customers before and it’s awesome to see how you can really develop their cast over time.
In a lesson you can often take someone up a level and hopefully give them the practise drills to go up a level afterwards and certainly reinforce what they have learned. But if you get the opportunity to do that once or twice a year for four of five years it’s incredible what you and they can achieve.
Video is great. The Hudl App is outstanding but it has to be used in small doses of course. In terms of showing really what it is you want to show there is nothing else quite like it. Once again that’s cloning pure and simple. You film them. They film you. And then you split screen in slow motion to show the difference. It’s always a question as to what takes longer so it’s something I’m more likely to use to break through a problem I can’t manoeuvre through quickly.
I mention this because that’s where I’ve well and truly jumped off the bus with different ways of learning because I’ve never had a student not get a massive result from this parallel video technique. And that’s all visual.
Cheers, Paul
. My aim was to make the point that both “learning styles” and Myers-Briggs are controversial.