2022-04-04

2022-04-04, Monday

Teaching my regular classes at the Ross Farnsworth - East Valley YMCA.

I had four students in the first class, including the father-and-son pair, and that worked out really nicely. His son was having a high-energy day, and it helped to have another grown-up who could tell him to “chill” when necessary. We made good progress on basics, but “dad” was having particular trouble with coordinating his arms for gedan barai when standing in place in front of a mirror. It’s pretty common for particular students to hit a sort of “road block” trying to learn a given technique in a given way. That’s why it’s so important to know more than one way to teach the same thing.

For in-place downward block, I have students start with a completed block. Then I tell them to put their back hand (the one on their hip) on the opposite shoulder. I specifically avoid using “right” and “left” at this stage, because it changes every time, but (at least in this drill) you always use your back hand and students seem to have better luck remembering that. So step 1 is “back hand to shoulder” and step 2 is “block.” Standing in front of a mirror, this works pretty well. If a student is still having trouble, I’ll stand in front of them, facing them, perform the motions very slowly, and have them “mirror” me. Most importantly, I have everyone repeat the words, “Back hand to shoulder … block! Back hand to shoulder … block!” This forces them to engage their brains to verbalize what they’re trying to do. Eventually we stop saying it out loud, but by this point they’ve built up a sort-of automatic internal monologe that reminds them what to do if they forget.

In the second class, I had a single shodan, so we worked on his needs, specifically. First was timing - this particular student has a bit of difficulty synchronizing his body so that everything stops at the end of the technique. Specifically, his back leg continues to straighten after the rest of his body has “landed.” We isolated this to his thinking about how he steps forward, starting with the “traditional” (scare quotes) one-leg pull/push way of thinking and ending with a discussion of what it meant to have “outside tension” in a stance. Just thinking about it differently made a world of difference right off the bat. We spent the balance of our time working through Nijushiho.