On the topic of training new people, Robert Harrell has said:
“I think there is a place for practicing certain skills in isolation, but if we never practice everything at once, it will never come together.”
I have heard it said that doing TPRS in Blaine’s “stepless” way makes it “harder for beginners”.
People making this claim say that we need to “break TPRS down for beginners”. Why?
I coached high school basketball (for two years before burning out) and we played a lot more than we practiced passing, dribbling, etc. Shooting individually is not at all like shooting with someone in your face in a real game.
Yes I know that Steph Curry shoots a ton of 3 pointers a day in practice but the analogy kind of breaks down when you consider that he has been playing basketball games as well since he was a little kid.
He grew up playing drive way pick up games with the first NBA three point star ever – his dad. His dad probably did not make his son do lay-ups for two hours and then play basketball for fifteen minutes?
And as they played games was bigger and already an NBA star and so now Seth can drain last second shots with people’s hands in his face. He just did it again today to wind over OKC.
But with teachers? Practicing circling when we don’t really even circle in stories in that way? We can’t just sashay up to the basket and do a lay up in a game (the other team doesn’t like that). Practicing what? What is there to practice?
Our practice happens in the next class that comes in. Workshops have failed to teach this method because of their insistence on breaking things down into pieces.
If we want to be like Blaine we need to just stand up and do what Blaine does. For so long now we have been saying how important practicing the fundamentals of TPRS is so important. I just don’t believe it.
I believe that new people can learn TPRS faster and better by just teaching on their feet in workshops than by breaking it down.
Few agree with me on this. They are all on the fundamentals train and the lesson plans train. But in my view we make it hard for them by presenting it to them in little pieces in the same way that we make it hard for our students when we present it them in little pieces.