Fencing Bear at Prayer

Short answer: No, not if you're doing it right. As, for example, here, where I am trying to explain an insight that came to me at the tournament this past weekend while I was thinking about whether I should just quit trying to fence épée as a second weapon and stick to foil.  I've been competing in épée off and on, I now realize, for going on something like three or so years .  And yet, I am nowhere nearly as strong in épée now as I was when I had been competing in foil for the same amount of time.  By the time I had been competing in foil as long as I have been competing in épée, I was a D.  I'm not even an E in épée at the moment, nor is it likely that I will be any time soon. So why is that?  Well, I don't really get to practice épée much now that our club moved and most of the fencers that I practice with only do foil.  But that isn't all of it.  I could say that it's because I haven't been working hard enough at it, but that isn't quite it e...

My husband has a saying: "Anything you do for money gets old." It's almost term time, which means I'm going to have reading to do. Not reading that I want to do, but reading that I have to do in order to be ready for class. At least, now it's reading that I have to do. When I set up the courses that I will be teaching, I specifically designed at least one of them (the graduate course) to give me the chance to do reading that I simply wanted to do (perhaps more accurately, to have done) for the sake of my research, but now that I've spent the last week sick and therefore unable to write and therefore trying to make the best of things by getting started on the reading for term, I know that, yet again, it simply doesn't work. As soon as reading becomes something assigned, whether for class or out of the conviction that it is something that I "need" to have read, it dies. It could be the most interesting book in the world, and yet as soon as...

1. I'm interested in it. 2. I've read a book on it. 3. I've taken a course on it. 4. I've taught a course on it. 5. I've written a book on it based on other people's research. 6. I've written a book on it based on the primary sources. 7. I've written a book on it based on the primary sources in the original languages. 8. I've written a book on it based on the primary sources still in manuscript. 9. I've written several books on it (repeat #5-8). 10. I've practiced it for a few months. 11. I've practiced it for years. 12. I realize I'm just a beginner.

Today's post was going to be something clever about how in the past week or so I'd found myself the butt of an argument I hadn't encountered since high school: someone berating me for using "big words" and assuming that because I was well-educated that meant that I was incapable of communicating with those less book-learned than myself. Instead, ironically enough, I have a headache--brought on, most likely, by a weekend spent sorting books so as to clear out space on our stuffed-to-bursting bookcases at home--and am reduced to watching Gilligan's Island , now conveniently available over the Internet (ah, nostalgia for when TV was TV!). If I didn't have this headache, I'm sure I could make something of all of this. About the way in which simplicity often conceals complexity and vice versa, or about the way in which the characters on G.I . represent the Seven Deadly Sins (although nobody can really seem to agree which ones ). Instead, I'm stuc...

1. Things I can do well but don't really think of as skills despite the fact that it took time (i.e. years) and effort to learn them: Touch type with some degree of speed and accuracy Write grammatical English Read and remember thousands of books and articles in my academic field, their authors and titles, and give a rough idea of their arguments without having to look them up (very useful when talking with colleagues, advising students or designing syllabi) Design a university-level course and teach it (see previous item) Converse on a high level about questions of history, theology, hermeneutics, and devotion Know where to look for bibliography in fields that I have not studied intensively myself Critique an argument and make suggestions on how to improve it (a.k.a. grading, but also thesis advising and peer review) Read medieval European book hands in manuscript Read and translate Latin, plus a few other languages when I need to (mostly German and French) Design and carry out a ...

That's how long, according to the experts, it takes to become expert at something, say, writing academic prose or fencing.* Not "talent", not "genius", but 10,000 hours of practice. At 40 hours a week, 50 weeks in the year (giving yourself a bit of vacation), this means five years of full-time work. And full-time means full-time ; it won't do simply to show up at the gym or the library and stand around talking. 10,000 hours means 10,000 hours of concentrated effort and attention under conditions of high relevance, that is, pushing yourself to the edge hour after hour, for years . Most of us can't really work all those hours in the day with full concentration, so realistically it's going to take more like ten years to make our goal, practicing--really practicing--some four hours a day, five days a week. You might be able to compress it a bit by practicing on weekends, but it's still going to take upwards of seven years to even come close. N...

Yes, I'm still disappointed with myself . Last year, the week after I did so poorly at Nationals, I decided to get my navel pierced, in part because I'd just spent ten days in Miami Beach and had seen how many women (and men!) have had their tummies done and so was thinking, "Why not? My tummy is surely as good as theirs"; in part because I wanted something that I could change about who I was. And, of course, because I think it looks cool. This year, now that the piercing is fully healed,[1] I'm shopping for navel jewelry, but everything I like comes in diamonds and I'm not sure I can persuade my husband that we can afford (sigh) more bling right at this moment. I'm not really interested in getting a tattoo and I don't have any more body parts I'm eager to pierce [2], so I'm thrust back upon my blog and trying to think my way out of the paper bag that is my ego-self. But, oh, how I wish there was something else I wanted to have pierced...

A friend of mine who has been following my posts of late has been anxious to remind me that fencing is not something that you can learn by reading a book . In his words: "Fencing is so 3-D and reactive it is impossible to articulate into book learning." Rather, it is something one learns only by doing, more particularly, through the physical lessons that we have with our coach: "Everything you will need to learn about fencing he will teach you. There is no need to look elsewhere." Fencing, of course, is not the only activity to suffer this limitation. Tennis, knitting, singing, playing a musical instrument, walking, speaking a language, prayer: none of these activities is accessible to us in any way other than through practice itself. Far from being able to teach us "how to", books of themselves cannot even teach us how to read, as any one who has gone to a library and picked up a book without knowing the relevant conventions of translating phonemes...