Day Twenty-Two - Why Simple is Better In Group Teaching

The Six-Day War was fought between Egypt and Israel from June 5th and June 10th, 1967. I was a youngster at the time, but one of my oldest and dearest friends is an Egyptian actor who was conscripted into the army as a result. He is an artist, and like me, abhors the whole concept of murder and mayhem as a way to handle disagreements. He spoke fluent French, looked at a map, saw that England was close by, and thought "Well, they must speak French in England" little knowing the War of the Roses and all that ensued. So he escaped to London, and to his dismay discovered that no-one spoke French. He studied English and ended up working for the BBC. Now he is back acting in Egypt (on a British passport) and the point of this story was to share with you his wonderful observation of the process of learning the English language. He said: "On one page is the rule. It is simple and easy to understand. Then you turn the page, and there are nine pages of exceptions!" Studying neurology is a bit like that. At first glance, it is simple. As you dig, those nine pages of qualifying concepts muddy the whole thing until it is hard to know what is going on, or how to think about it. Give The Rule - Not the Nine Pages: Neurology in Group Teaching When you are teaching groups, giving people the simple rule to start them off is better than trying to explain all the complexities that you have come to know. Start with Aho-Alexander, and let the real learners dig deeper. They will. After all - you did. What Is The Simple One Rule Difference Between Thinking And Feeling? [NOTE: This second half of my blog is a paid area describing practical ways to implement what has been described above in a Facebook group with 47 other teachers and students. You can join anytime to be part of their discussions.]

When you move from the model of "Alexander-is-a-feeling" to "Alexander-is-thinking" it does not mean you abandon touch. In fact, if anything your touch needs to increase in it's potency. (By potency I mean the ability to convey the exact message that fits with a person's ability to understand it, and its appropriateness to the intention they have. That's another post, not today's topic, but let me know if you want more on that.) So you show them how they can deliver an Ah Ha experience, and they become thrilled with the result. What thrills them? It is how they feel, it is the difference in the quality of their movement. And this is where students - and often teachers - get confused. The Result Is Not The Cause Students think of the result as a cause, so when they are on their own, they try to remember the feeling they had through your touch, and use this as a guide to manage on their own. It doesn't work, and it doesn't work because is signals a fundamental misuse of their neurological system. Feeling is not a motor function, yet when a person is trying to recall how it felt in your lesson, that is exactly what they are trying to do. We've all seen it - we ask "What do you notice about your walking?" and the next thing we know they have slowed down, their eyes have gone glassy and they futilely attempt to "feel" what is going on. That is an example of turning sensory input into a motor function - and it short circuits the whole system. At a biological level, you can approach this anatomically. As my title says: let's be simple about the rule. What structures are indisputably in place - structures we've known about going on close to a century now - that facilitate thinking and feeling? The pipes. The nerve fibres. There are two kinds, named by their function - afferent fibres (sensory) and efferent fibres (motor). Hard to argue with that. Efferent fibres are the pipes for sending messages down to muscles, afferents are the pipes sending information back up to the brain about what happened. So there is a directionality in place: instructions (thinking) are being sent down from brain/spine to motor end plates (muscles), while the results (feeling) of those instructions are being sent back up to the brain from sensory receptors in muscles, tendons and other locations which locomotion is influencing. Now anyone even familiar with the complexities of neurological control may dismiss this grossly simplified view, but I am writing from the perspective of giving my students a grasp of what they are doing, not giving them a lesson in science. I am accurate to the degree I choose to, because I am choosing to leave out the nine pages. When a student descends to a body area looking to see how it feels - they are going the wrong way. They already have information about that area, there is nothing to look for, so if it was not registering into their consciousness it was probably because it didn't need to. Trust your Self/system to report what you need to know. Do you trust? Ask your students that. The thing about senses, and the reason we do not need to "sense" as though it is a thing we do, is that senses can't be turned off. Try it. Look at an object in front of you with your eyes open and decide not to see it. Not possible. Senses are always on, therefore they can't be turned on by a conscious decision to sense something. However, this is what our students try to do, with the result that they come back and say they got stiffer in their neck this week - then they ask you why? Because they are making sensing a motor activity. So what is my job? It is to make a motor plan. It is to start with my coordination plan - the head/spinal complex - and then use that as an organising influence on my activity plan. The result will be registered, and I have no idea what to expect. Let the senses do that job for me. My job is to decide what to do, not to decide how it should feel. As Alexander put it: "Be careful not to find what you are looking for." Let me know what you think… https://www.facebook.com/groups/ATCSProMembers/