NOWHERE did I say, or imply, any such thing.
"How are you going to learn anything [...] if you don't read?"
Explain, if you would, how that statement doesn't directly imply that reading is the only way to learn anything.
Perhaps you should brush up on your reading comprehension skills.
Since my exact statement was "your rhetoric suggests", not "you said", I don't think
my reading comprehension is the problem.
Well I have never said DVD's are a bad thing.
Again, "your rhetoric suggests". Whether you
said it is not the issue. The issue is that at no point in your argument do you show any respect for the DVD as an instructional method, which is simply unfair. Your complaint has
nothing to do with the instructional method itself, but with how the student interprets it. You are blaming the lesson for the student's failure.
I think it will be a life long argument of Books Vs DVD's.
This is what we call a "false dilemma". You are trying to choose, when you don't need to choose. There is no reason whatsoever why you need to choose between books and DVDs.
You can and should use both.
they watch a performance being done and then try to modify it into what they want, they simply can't, because they can see no other way of performing it. And these are beginners were talking about here.
Yes, because this is how beginners learn. It is only after seeing many routines from many people - whether in print or on screen - that they will gain the body of knowledge necessary to create their own routines. At first, those routines will simply be compilations of other people's disassembled routines, and then they will move forward to create routines that are theirs and theirs alone.
When you demand that people
must do this from the very
beginning, you simply raise the bar to a level most people can't reach. That doesn't do us any favors.
This really isn't anything new. What's happened is that with the new distribution channel of the internet, people around the world are learning the same tricks from the same people. Twenty years ago, if we lived on opposite sides of the country, we emulated the performances of
local magicians - so I had never seen the guy you copied, and you had never seen the guy I copied. It's not that there was less copying, it's that we were copying a larger selection of magicians.
A lovely quote from Simon Lovell: "A visual learner is simply somebody who's too lazy to learn how to read a book.
Yes, what a lovely quote about cognitive theory from a sleight of hand expert.
Hey... wait a minute.
A book, on the other hand, makes you think.
Emphasis mine.
The book FORCES you to think. The book REQUIRES you to think. If you DON'T think, you can't use it.
That makes the book
harder to use. That's a form of
inferiority.
A DVD will let you develop into the bloke sitting the other side of the screen.
So does a book! When you read a book, you're reading the opinions and preferences and directions of SOMEONE ELSE. The difference isn't that it's not somebody else, the difference is that
you can't see as much of it. This is not a benefit, it is a
flaw. Look into a book of card magic, and find one of the drawings that show how to hold your hand.
Is that drawing accurate?
You don't know. Because you don't see the actual magician performing the actual trick, you don't know if that's how he holds his hand or not. And in an awful lot of cases,
neither does the magician.
You can never get that from a book. If the author is just plain wrong, you can't tell. If he says "put your finger here" but actually puts his finger somewhere else, the book doesn't say that. You need to see him perform the trick. And the book won't show you that.
Again, there are some great DVD's out there. But there are many, many more great books.
Since we've been writing books for some six thousand years longer than any form of video archival medium has existed, what exactly did you expect?
