2024-09-04

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

One month ago my room was rented out to a dance company for a week on short notice, but we found another room to train in and made do for the week. This week I’ve learned that the same dance company will now have my room every Monday night, effective immediately. Wednesday classes would be unaffected, but that left us homeless on Mondays. That’s not great, but karate is nothing if not the study of how to handle unfortunate events, so I found a solution.

The room next door to our group fitness studio is used for an after-school program, but it’s about the same size and has a suitable tile floor, assuming we can get all the tables and chairs out of the way. It’s not as “pretty” as the room we use now. It has no wooden floor, no floor-to-ceiling mirrors, and no ceiling fans, but I’ve certainly trained in worse. So we’re going to give that a shot for a few weeks. If that doesn’t work, I’ve been told we can switch to a Tuesday/Thursday schedule, but I’d rather not disrupt everyone’s schedules if we can avoid it.

In training news, larger classes are great, but I’m starting to find that I don’t have time to get through everything every week. If everyone’s working on Taikyoku Shodan that’s one thing, but once you’ve got students working on five or six different kata, it’s tough to get through them all every night. It’s a good problem to have, but with all levels in the same class it’s tough to keep everyone engaged without losing people.