Bradley,
I can’t say enough good things about your videos and Forum over on The Dirt. I am one of Lag’s students (Mod3) and the deeper I get into the modules the more amazed I am by not only the content of incredible information but the organization of it all too. But I think the thing that really stands out to me is both Your’s and Lag’s flat out ability to teach. It is obviously rare when a great player becomes a great teacher though it seems like it comes pretty naturally to both of you as I have seen it with other students through the forum and have experienced it from Lag myself. You guys always seem to hit all the right buttons with most of your students let alone the fact most of it is done via E-mail and through the forum etc…When you were on tour did you find yourself helping other players and sharing information? Have you worked on teaching(how people learn and so forth) aside from giving lessons? Thanks!
If I thought it would mess up my competitors I would gladly share information!
Teaching full time is a different mindset. The goal is to help others… and in doing so… I feel a responsibility to keep my own game in some kind of respectable form. The module work does this easily as far as the flat out ball striking. Where I lack now is the touch and feel stuff you get from playing every day. Distance control, and probably hitting it a bit more solid when playing full time and grinding golf balls.
I don’t teach ideals or concepts I can’t perform myself. I am not into speculative teaching. I don’t believe either that there is only one swing. But experience playing on tour for years showed me a lot of things that a club pro or range pro just isn’t going to have access to.
The best strikers I ever saw came out of the persimmon era. The lost art of proper ball control is fading with each passing year. So we are keeping that information relevant into the modern age.
The US Open this year exposed the inability of the bomb and gouge generation to properly negotiate a classic US Open layout. If one is required to put the ball into a narrow fairway off the tee, a frying pan driver is not a good choice of equipment. Persimmon would be much better. A good persimmon player would have had an advantage over the field. Phil was smart to leave the driver in the hotel room.
I can’t say I jumped straight into the transition from playing to teaching. My first period of giving lessons wasn’t as good as I hoped as I was conveying feelings instead of getting the student to gain their own feelings from the lesson. I am always learning with my instruction and how to get a point across that isn’t too harsh or domineering but gives the student the opportunity to think for themselves also. I think that gives a person the best opportunity to learn.
I feel very confident in my ability now to get the good stuff across to a student just from the experience of doing it more and more and seeing the similarities and differences in people and seeing the cause and effects of things over and over again by teaching more and more and gaining confidence and a keen eye to see it and dissect it.
I learned a lot about online conversation from Lag and how there is a point with conversation but it should never be a flat out “I am right you are wrong” attitude. Lag has the best attitude I have seen in forum discussion. We all know there is always disagreements and differing beliefs out there in internet world, but I think Lag and now myself have learned to cope with these disagreements and be able to see things from both sides. We still hold true in our beliefs and try to portray them to the best of our vocabularies but we see the other people’s point of view because we have been there and done that and been caught in a one way understanding without an open mind and without testing things out to see if yes or no- they do or do not work. I believe that to be our best attributes. We test things out ourselves so we can and will have an answer to anything that arises. We don’t guess. And if there is something that comes up that we don’t know about or haven’t thought about - we try it out and test it over a period of time to get an honest answer. No response just for the sake of a response. If it takes two days or two weeks or two months to comprehend and come up with the correct answer that is what we would rather do than band aiding things.
The module work is by far the greatest thing I have seen to enable a student to learn- because it is work… proper work…but it allows a lot of interpretation and feel to be left to the student themselves. We can’t get inside someone’s head and know what they are feeling or thinking…so that is where your senses come alive…