2024-07-15

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

Attendance is recovering as students return from summer vacations. I had a total of 12 tonight, with a good spread of ranks, so my beginners were exposed to a few that are well beyond their pay grade. Everyone made mistakes, even on the kata they’ve been working on for some time. That’s just how kata goes. There are always mistakes. Hopefully they get smaller and fewer over time, but I expect beginners to make more mistakes than advanced students do.

But why should that only apply to the moving part of karate? What about all the “other stuff”? While closing class, just after kneeling, one of the black belts was urging the lower rank to straighten the line with what I percieved as a hint of impatience, so I decided to make this a teaching moment.

Kata is a “formal exercise” - a series of movements, in a particular order, and with a particular cadence. But what about the little “ceremonies” we do at the beginning and end of class? We kneel, recite the dojo kun, and bow several times. Isn’t that also a formal exercise, done in a particular order, with a particular cadence? I don’t expect the white belts to perform their katas perfectly, so why should my expectations of them be any different when it comes to the opening and closing of class?

Of course that cuts both ways. I expect my senior students to be able to do these things with little-to-no coaching, because they’ve been doing it for a while. If your brown belts can’t tie their belts correctly, that’s a scoldworthy problem. White belts kneeling in a mildly skewed line? Not so much.