How often do your students practise/train?

[Paul Arden]

I’m not aiming my videos for instructors but for students. I think what instructors look for and what students look for are and should be different. That’s often why internal cues are given. The Six Steps for example, will lead to internal cues if we are not careful.

I agree we need to study the student. We need a communication loop. I love the beginning of my lessons. They talk and I take notes. It’s our job under these circumstances to listen and to ask questions.


I’ve had a lot of students lay off for the winter. I know most, if not all, have been training. But less than usual. The next month will be very interesting indeed.

Cheers, Paul

[VGB]

The Six Steps for example, will lead to internal cues if we are not careful.

I wrote that initially and then deleted it because I thought it would bring on another round of bulging eyes . The 6 steps has its place but it’s a mechanistic approach to a system analysis that has a some significant squishy bits in it. What drove my observation was that there’s often an assumption that you tell a student to do something and they do it but quite often that’s not the case.

Looking forward to seeing the videos.

Regards

Vince

[Paul Arden]

There has to be an additional instructor’s step. You see the body movement you want to adjust, or preferably “pattern”, the obvious thing is to tell the student how to move/ what movement to change. But we don’t want to do that, instead we need to create or offer an external cue that gives the result. That takes a little bit of work, trial and error, it’s not obvious and actually it is thoroughly entertaining.

It’s like examining instructors as we used to do before we discovered it was prompting (and how undoubtedly most exams are still given). Trying to get to the answer without giving it away. It was interesting to learn from an external examiner that asking leading questions is considered to be coaching the candidate during an exam. If that was adopted then exams would be very much shorter!!

And of course the better, more complete method, for developing someone’s cast, is to find a drill that allows the student to isolate and explore a movement by magnifying and minimising it, or by contrasting it to different but related movement/s. It’s a hell of a lot more interesting teaching this way. And in my opinion far more effective for long term flycasting development, as well as for student interest and active involvement.

If a student has the tools to isolate a movement or component and explore and develop it on their own, in their own time, over hours and even weeks, then of course this is going to create something that’s far more robust and adaptable than simply telling someone how to move for a specific cast.

What I would add, is that since our students are often videoing themselves, they also need to be taught the importance of creating external cues and analogies for their movements. We can do that while teaching them, by asking them to create an analogy for us. For example my Excalibur cue. Slicing a straight line down with the rod from the clouds in front to the trees. That’s a visual external cue, and also an analogy, what it actually accomplishes is torque being applied to the rod butt at the end of the stroke instead of the poking translational force that we usually see, and a resulting change of pattern. If that doesn’t work I say to take the thumb and reach out and place it down on top of the tree. And if that doesn’t work we find something else. We can isolate it and go ground to ground with the Launch Drill for example.

Students love drills. And quite frankly I think most of them come to a lesson expecting them.

Cheers, Paul