Students or customers?
Eastern traditions and Western values. What role do they have to play in teaching Taiji?
Image - Misty Fishing Trip, godslar / 郑 无忌, Unsplash
Are the people who join my classes students or customers?
Please bear with me as I walk you through this one.
When I was a lot younger and training in Karate and Taekwondo, classes were very formal. You bowed in and out of the dojo / dojang, if you were late, you waited politely to the side and signalled your intent to join the class. You would wait until you were invited to join the group.
When pairing up for partner exercises or sparring, you’d always bow. And once you had finished, you’d bow. The same ritual would be followed when switching partners.
Training included a lot a lot of press ups (on your knuckles in Taekwondo classes!), squat thrusts and burpees. I don’t remember even bringing a water bottle to a class.
That was all a long time ago. Things have changed.
In my Taiji training, there’s been less of an expectation for such formality, but I can’t quite rid myself of the habit. In Kung Fu classes, we always execute a ‘salute’ at the opening and close of the class, and that feels ‘right’.
Because of the belt and grading systems in Karate, Taekwondo, and the sashes with Kung Fu, it’s easy to see the hierarchy, and it was expected that you would line up and organise yourselves in belt order.
I like these traditions and am happy to follow them. It shows respect to your teachers and to your fellow students.
With Taiji, whilst there is a defined curriculum and progression, we don’t wear belts or sashes and there is a little less ‘order’ in a class. Students pretty much stand where they want to stand.
As a child I was always rebellious at school, not agreeing that I had to stand for the teachers, and doing so only reluctantly. So I found it interesting that I was willing to show such deference for my martial arts teachers - I guess it was because it was my choice.
I chose to show respect, because I had respect for them.
They had earned the respect.
But, as in any walk of life, respect that is earned, can just as easily be eroded and lost.
This brings me to the title of this post - students or customers? And conversely - are we teachers or service providers?
There’s no doubt that my students pay me to provide a service to them.
Wutan prides itself on being one of the best schools in the country for Traditional Chinese Martial Arts (TCMA), so shouldn’t we deliver the best possible teaching to our students?
If I don’t provide a good service, I expect that they will vote with their feet, stop paying me, and stop attending my lessons.
I don’t expect automatic deference. I don’t even like being called ’sifu / shifu’. I hope to earn the respect and trust of my students over time. I also know I am going to have bad days and there will be bad lessons - we are all human.
I would always love to have a chance to receive feedback from students rather than them just disappearing off the map. Am I doing too much qigong? Not enough? Is the pace wrong? Too slow? Boring? Confusing? No decent teaching aids or handouts?
The tradition in our Eastern modelled practice goes against our modern consumerist views on value for money and customer service. We can’t send in an anonymous ‘secret shopper’ to test the level of customer service. We don’t send ‘customer satisfaction surveys’ to students to rate their teacher. Senior instructors from my school don’t turn up unannounced and observe me teach a class. There is a big assumption that I know what I am doing!
Thinking in Western terms, there is at least one check-point or quality control measure that we employ at our school, instructors are expected to attend monthly teacher training at our headquarters. The session is three to four hours long and could cover a huge range of topics from the TCMA syllabus. There are opportunities to observe experts and masters closely. Partner drills and small group breakouts allow great opportunities for coaching and correction.
Our master often talks about providing variety to students to avoid boredom. I think of this in Western business terms as ‘customer retention’. It’s axiomatic that it is cheaper to keep your existing customers than it is to acquire new ones.
We are teachers that provide a service in exchange for a fee. If we want to stay ‘in business’, we have to strive continuously to understand the needs of the students and to cater for those needs as far as we can, within the constraints of the resources available to us and the traditions of our school.
Wrapping up…
This is an East meets West topic. In this sense it is both hard and soft, very Yin and Yang ☯️.
People who join my classes are students of Taiji, and they are my customers. There should be no unquestioning and blind loyalty, if they see value in what I teach and how I teach it, they may come to respect me as a teacher, and they may come to my lesson next week, and the week after.
