The student’s responsibilities to the teacher include having an open mind. Moreover, understand yourself going into the lesson. By that I mean understand where you fit among the four different learning styles:
- Cognitive. The person who likes to read and understand.
- Visual. The person who likes to see and therefore imitate.
- Kinesthetic. The person who likes to feel what it is he or she has to do.
- Concrete experiential. A fancy term for learning by trial and error.
When you are getting started in golf, do not be afraid to tell the teacher that you’re a visual learner and that you would prefer that he demonstrate for you or use mirrors. The more you can cut down the learning time between student and teacher the better off you are going to be. By letting the teacher know your best way of learning you can expedite the process.
Having said that, the student has to also understand that if he wants to permanently learn a motor skill then he needs to experience it in all four of the arenas. Let’s say I’m a kinesthetic learner. The first thing I need to do is feel it. If I can feel it, then I’ll try it over and over again. But I also need to see it and I need to understand it. I need to practice it if I’m ever going to retain it. Learning by feel and feel alone can be very, very difficult, if not impossible.
An example: Player comes to me and is taking the club way inside on his backswing. I ask him to take it straight back. Player says to me, “Oh, you want me to take it outside.” No, I want you to take it straight back. He says, “Well, it’s outside.” He’s right and I’m right. The club is going back outside of where it was, but it is going straight back relative to standard straight. What he’s feeling is not what he’s doing, but rather where he’s coming from. If he continues to work on it diligently, on feeling the club going back outside, he’ll come back to me in two weeks and he’ll be outside. Then I’ll tell him to take it straight back. He’ll say, “What’s going on? The last time you told me to take it outside, now you’re telling me to take it inside.” In reality, the positions are identical to what I wanted both weeks in a row. If he had a visual image of where it was and an understanding of where it needed to be, he would not have overworked the feel issue.
Also, have a simple goal for your lesson and stick to it. This is the same training technique for all sports instruction. Don’t feel like you’re going to solve all your problems in one 30- or 60-minute lesson. That is not going to happen. Be willing to fix one flaw with one lesson.
Always make sure that you understand whether you’ve been given a practice thought or a play thought by your teacher. Sometimes they are radically different. If you go to the golf course with practice thoughts you’re really going to play poorly.
As for the teacher’s responsibility to the student and what the student should look for in a teacher, I always joke that the first thing I do if someone is to look at my game is ask what he’s working on in his game. Because if I get the same message, then maybe he’s not giving me a lesson. Maybe he’s just seeing his faults in my swing. I always want to be aware of that. This is important in making certain the teacher is teaching you and not wishing he were there hitting golf balls. That’s a fact of life, unfortunately.
If you see all the students of a particular teacher swinging identically, doing the same things, beware. You’re going to be asked to fit into a mold that you may not be able to fit into. Having said that, most teachers are really good about teaching the individual. But you need to make sure that is what your teacher is going to do.
Accept what the teacher says at face value. Give it a try. If it doesn’t seem to work or make sense, then question it. Don’t take it blindly, because you can be led down a path of three or four months of working to get rid of whatever it is you’re practicing if you’ve been given information that is wrong for you.
Finally, try to set up communication with a teacher and have him set up communication with you on your terms. It’s really important, and the best student-teacher relationships are founded on good communication. Let him talk to you on your terms. Don’t be forced to communicate on his terms.
Here are a few more simple rules:
- A lesson is no good if you don’t work on it. You need to practice to improve in the sports you play.
- Three 30-minute practice sessions in a week are better than two 45-minute sessions, which are better than one 90-minute session, which is better than nothing. That’s the transition I much prefer; frequent short practices are much better than sporadic long practice sessions.
- Never practice before a round, only after. Or when you’re not playing.
- The frequency of your lessons should be determined by the following: You will either have learned or assimilated what the teacher suggested and you figure you’re ready to go onto the next level, or you’ll be confused and screwed up and have to go back and get it re-explained. The time frame varies considerably based on the subject that the lesson focused on. Sometimes it can be a week, sometimes it can be a month. I don’t favor constant, every Friday afternoon lesson formats. Invariably you turn into a swing freak and stop remembering how to play golf.
