I'm going to Arizona for the first time in two weeks to teach at Shawn Knight's camp there the first weekend of December. Ed Parker Jr and Steve LaBounty will be on staff, too, so I'm looking forward to that. I'm also looking forward to seeing Carole Wolken, my first Judo instructor, who is retired there. Carole lost her husband last year but she's doing well and we're going to have some time to hang out during my visit. If it hadn't been for Carole I'd have likely decided martial arts were not for me.
Just recently I was told some stories about initial experiences in the arts that defined perspectives on what the arts are about. I had a bad Judo teacher at the YMCA when I took my first few lessons. My mom thought I really liked it so she enrolled me at a full-time school, which is where I met Carole. She corrected my mistakes and I found that learning to fall and roll was fun, not painful. That may literally have been a meeting that changed my life.
A few days ago I took a flight check with an US Air Force officer/check airman, Major Carlos Salinas. He'd heard I'm a "karate guy" and I asked him if he'd ever taken it. He had when he was a teenager living on the US Marine base at Parris Island. He told me the first or second lesson he had with his friends and a Marine who taught the class they were learning to spar and the instructor broke his buddies nose with a spin kick. He decided that studying the arts was not for him.
That same day when my deputy director for Standards and Evaluation here in Florida Wing called me to see how my ride went we got to talking karate. Alan was US Army and kick-boxed in the service. He told me about how his first lessons with a military instructor when he was a teen were complete with kicks in the solar plexus when he or his friends were caught talking in class. It didn't stop him from continuing but he remembers it well as a negative experience.
I don't want you to think this is limited to military instructors. Lots of instructors think it's OK to hit their students in such manners. Maybe less today since people started to sue karate teachers but it's still happening.
A student I had in Ft. Myers had her nose broken in her first college Tae Kwon Do class. She quit but came back to it many years later with me, with a lot of encouragement (and courage). She's now approaching black belt with Mike Squatrito at Gulf Coast Kenpo.
Yes, we have to hit students when teaching techniques to show the physical effects to some degree. I've been hit plenty hard many times. I've have the chipped teeth, scars, and pains to show for it. But I don't hit kids and new students hard. I don't even hit the black belts too hard anymore though they tell me that even soft feels hard.
And my flight check? Successful. Major Salinas was very happy with me and my program here in FL. He told us at the hangar that he is inspired by the volunteers we have in the Civil Air Patrol. And I didn't even have to break his nose.
No comments:
Post a Comment