There's so much I'd like to write about the "practice that wasn't a practice." There's nothing I find so interesting, so rewarding as teaching. So there we were trying to teach Sooozie some of the most difficult combat skills. We were groping for the right way to phrase these most difficult ideas. We were talking about some things that most fighters never even think about. I think Gyrth was the first to really develop a truly analytic approach to thinking about fighting.

Based on that approach, it's very easy for me to teach basic combat skills, even to students that aren't all that receptive. That same approach makes it pretty easy to teach advanced combat skills to receptive students. The next level up is to try to help students with the intellectual, spiritual, and other non-physical attributes that one might call combat skills.

One of the most important of these skills, is what this whole section is about. Teaching fighting is a very difficult skill to teach. There are a lot of mediocre teachers out there. There are a lot of mostly competent teachers out there. There are vanishing few really talented teachers. It's a difficult combination of empathy and intellect that produces the best teachers. You have to do a running read on the student at the same time you figure out the best way to craft the right message delivered with the right vehicle.

It's really great working with Gyrth when we're teaching. I decided to try a new and more complicated approach with Suze. After just getting started, I looked over at Gyrth, I knew immediately that he knew exactly what I was doing. He said "right behind you." Which is pretty funny because it means that he had no objection and was very interested in where we were going and he'd help me all the way. Right up until I fell off the cliff, he'd be behind me.

In any case, Sooz was very patient with us as we groped through unexplored territory. As with most complicated teaching, success is having the student walking away with some useful information, even if it's not everything the teacher was trying to convey. It's about the student, not the teacher. I'll let her tell you the specifics of what we were talking about. I'm more interested in her thoughts about what we were talking about than what I think we were talking about. :)