Pedagogy in Fencing pt I: The Instructor's Mind

Teaching is not instructing

The temptation is to measure a good class by what you delivered — the drills covered, the corrections made, the material transmitted. But your students are not receivers. The real work is subtler: watching each person, filtering signal from noise, finding the nudge that produces a genuine shift. A good instructor doesn't carry the lesson; they carry part of the burden of each student's practice, reading what's needed and adjusting until something behind the eyes changes. That's the outcome. Everything else is just delivery.

Know your system

A list of memorised drills will eventually run out. Drills that derive from first principles never do — because the principles generate new material as needed. Build a system, and you stop being a proxy for someone else's curriculum and become a source. When a student asks an unexpected question, or something breaks down mid-class, you don't search your memory for the right drill. You reason from what you know, and the answer is there.

Controlling your own state

It can feel like a matter of personality — some people are naturally calm under pressure, others aren't. But an instructor's composure is less about temperament than about role. Assuming the role expands you beyond your current emotional state; you become someone the class can orient around. A calm instructor is not necessarily an untroubled one. They've learned that the class takes its cues from them — and that losing control of yourself means losing control of the room. This is not just pedagogy. It is a safety requirement.

Class plans

A rigid plan makes you deaf — to the energy in the room, to the question that changes everything, to the student on the verge of a breakthrough if you'd only follow it. But this isn't an argument against planning. It's an argument for internalising your plans so thoroughly that you can set them aside. The instructor who always seems to have a direction, no matter how circumstances shift, isn't improvising — they've done enough preparation that the plan is no longer a crutch. As Vladimir Vasiliev once put it: class plans are great, but best left at home.

Red thread

When you've built a clever progression, the urge is to make sure the students see it. Resist this. A visible theme becomes a frame the students try to fit themselves into rather than something they discover through their own movement. Keep it as an undercurrent. The instructor who can connect everything meaningfully doesn't announce the connections — they build toward them, letting the coherence land as felt experience rather than explained structure. The students don't need to know the thread was there. They just need to improve.

Don't look — see

Patterns can hide errors just as easily as they reveal them. You spot a recurring shape in someone's movement and correct for it, but the shape was a symptom — the cause was something else entirely, visible only at the periphery of your attention. Practice expanding your awareness outward while zooming in on an individual. Learn to see the internal mechanics behind a movement, the structural reason a position keeps collapsing. An instructor who is truly aware of everything around them — even while seemingly focused on one person — is seeing at two scales simultaneously. That's the skill.

And when you find something to correct in one student, look for it in the others. It might belong to the whole group. And if it does, the root cause may well be in your own demonstration.

Let them forget

Trying to hold everything leads to a particular anxiety — the feeling of something about to slip away. But memory doesn't work by accumulation; it works by retrieval. Forgetting is not the enemy of learning. It is the mechanism. Build an environment where students must recall rather than just receive, and they will eventually remember — not because you made it easy, but because they had to reach for it.

Invest in failures

Optimism aids retention, and we want students to feel good. But a class where everyone succeeds all the time is either too easy or not entirely honest. Real learning happens through trial, error, and the positive reinforcement that follows — and that sequence requires failure as its first step. Behind every clean technique in a bout is a thousand failures in training that no one saw. Make failure a normal, even expected part of the environment. Not as punishment, and never at the cost of safety — but as the condition under which real progress becomes possible.

Learning beyond the comfort zone

Deliberate practice allows learning within the comfort zone. But it can become uncomfortable due to tedium, at which point I'd just go for harder challenges that are beyond what the students or I can comfortably do. Learning something completely new might require re-aligning, or expansion of our internal models. This can be uncomfortable all the way to causing a painful sensation, but it is transient. Once we push through, there will be a lot of room for deliberate practice that is still engaging. Sometimes we can also step into chaos in order to learn, such as fencing against an opponent whose skill level is too high for us to control. For us, it will feel chaotic, but eventually we will recognize the patterns and learn to reason about it. Given that safety is not compromised, this might not even have to be all that uncomfortable.