“All right guys, do you remember the new
verbs we learned yesterday?”
Silence. Dead silence.
“Okay, let's look at our notes from
yesterday to see if that jogs our memory.”
Not a rustle of paper in the group of
twenty.
“Okay, then, take out your notebooks—you’re
going to want to take notes on these.”
Not a hair of movement in the whole class,
and twenty blank faces staring at me. Was I speaking English? They seemed not
to think so.
“Don't you keep notebooks?” I asked
warily.
That got a few mumbles from my
mostly-junior class. “Er, ummm . . . .” Some glances down at the shoelaces.
By this time a notebook or two had
appeared. “Hey, when you really want to remember something, and it’s important,
if you write it down, then you can look back at it and it will help you
remember it. You know,” I confessed, “I always jot down notes when I come back
from jiu jitsu. Even though it’s not academic, it’s a sport, I come home and
review what I have learned. I put it in a notebook so I can look back at it
later, because it is important to me.”
“What?” A student gasped incredulously. “You
take notes after your jiu jitsu class? That takes all the fun out of it!”
Sure, if “fun” is defined as repeating the
same mistakes over and over again, struggling to remember that great move you
thought would totally open up your game, and getting caught in the same
submission class after class after class, then, yes, fun removed.
When
I started jiu jitsu, I didn’t write down anything. I saw the blogs and the logs
of jiu jitsu practitioners’ classes and I reacted like that gasping student,
without the gasps. Jiu jitsu was supposed to be a break from have-tos
and shoulds. If I came home and took
notes, I was just adding another chore to my already too-long list. I understood
why people did it, but that wasn’t for
me.
I grudgingly started taking a few notes at
the urging of a fellow student. I struggled with the best way to organize my
notebook, but in the end realized that just getting something down was the most
important part.
I still am not consistent in my
notes. I take them when I see something I really
don’t want to forget. And the visuals. How do you put in words exactly how to
move your body in this jiu jitsu way? My notes are filled with stick figures in
weird embraces. And I have quirky little names and abbreviations for different
sides and movements. When I look back at my notes, I have to decipher my own
code.
Trying to remember what I meant when I
wrote the notes, I mentally go through the move, practicing it one way, now
another. I must have meant this way, I think to myself, and then redo
the move in my mind until it makes sense. That is what helps me learn.
