There’s a good mix of body types and skill levels in my Tai Chi class. As the most junior person in the group, I have the benefit of always working with people who are better than me (although being able to teach someone myself would certainly help solidify the concepts in my head).
Nothing beats working with the teacher, who can precisely vary his skill level so one can learn and absorb things in small increments, a systematic way of fine-tuning the details at a gradual pace. It’s something that takes a great deal of time for better results in the long-run, and I’m sure that in this sense, he’s investing in his students as much as one invests in the class.
Still, there are senior students who teach me significant things within a single minute of working with them. They fill in the gaps in my knowledge that I’m not sure I’d be able to figure out by myself, because they’ve been at my level before and understand what I’m doing wrong. Add to this a propensity to teach and help, and every class I walk away feeling like I’m improving, if only by a small amount. Sometimes it’s to the point where I feel like my mind is going to explode, and the coordination of my body needs to catch up with the concepts in my brain.
But there are also senior students who seem stiff and uncooperative to the point where I feel I don’t learn anything from them. And even though I’m told they’re being nice and not overbearing, I find practicing with them to be very difficult. It’s as if they’re working too far beyond my level, where my structure falls apart and I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. Maybe it just means I’m not skilled enough to adjust and do it right yet. I’m still thankful to be able to work with them though, because at the very least, they remind me that not everyone who’s going to attack you will be cooperative.
It’s important when studying any martial system to train with a variety of partners — including the ones you don’t like training with as much. I’ve learned a lot over the years from being tossed around, thumped or humiliated by people that I had to train with in a group setting.
As long as the person doing it isn’t a bully [and it's the supervising teacher's job to make sure that no one is bullied]; working with someone you might not otherwise even talk to in a different setting is “character building” in martial terms. Oh, and learning these lessons can spill into daily life as well so that you get an extra benefit from the training.
In martial terms, size and weight do matter — though the movies often would have us believe otherwise — and a smaller person has to learn to deal with it in the same way that a larger person has to learn not to rely on any size advantage that the Gods may have given them.
It was actually my daily life that has given me the “character building” required to understand the benefits of practicing with less desirable partners. Work especially, where one is stuck with the same people for eight hours — generally as much time as one is awake at home — and many of whom with which I would otherwise conflict.
I’m currently thankful that I’m smaller rather than larger, if only for the fact that I can easily tell when I’m cheating with force. I’d probably feel differently in a real confrontation though.