I’ve been working on the site, doing some catch up with the lessons from Term 2 at Drummoyne and Epping which I haven’t posted yet. One of the main reasons for the delay is the time it takes me to convert my brief teaching notes into detailed step by step instructions. Most of the time my drill notes will be a simple single sentence for me to remember the drill. A drill that states “Feint disengage to hit on the pass” is not in any way useful for a student to understand the actual drill. The more detailed explanation requires me to describe starting guards, and detailed actions in sequence, roughly 5 to 6 times greater wordage compared to my teaching notes. I also have to add the teaching notes which explain the subtlety of each individual action and the various mistakes that can occur, all of which make the drill information useful for remote readers.

As a part of this catch up I’ve also added a new menu group for the Spadone lessons. This menu page also has the lessons listed in order for the teaching curriculum I followed during the course. This now brings the number of teaching curricula to 3 for the site. Each of the spadone lesson posts now also has links at the bottom of the page to the lesson either side of the lesson being viewed in the program, as well as a link back to the main index page.

I’ve also removed the individual menu item lists for the Italian Rapier teaching curriculum, as I’m adding the next set of lessons. The extended menu for the individual lessons was becoming too unwieldy to use and maintain. It also reflects the shift from pages to posts for the ongoing lesson notes, which allows me to automatically post to Google + and Facebook, as well as provide the blog syndication feed used by the site. None of these notification processes work with pages, which is important for many of my readers.