Another scenario. You have a new student walk into
your Dojo. How do you gear training to get them to
stick with it, without making it too hard for them that
they can’t keep up or too easy that its boring? What is
the happy medium?
I think the most successful way if you are going to do stuff like that is to have a beginners
class. When you get a white belt come into a class, that’s a regular ongoing one and
you’ve got coloured Kyu grade belts and some black belts in it, unless they are very naturally talented, they are never going to be able to take to that class and they are never going to learn the basics properly.
At Higaonna Sensei’s Dojo, he will always cut someone out to teach the beginners, even if
it is a brown belt. I was even taught my basics by a brown belt, because there was a lack
of black belts everywhere back in those days. I can only think of four black belts back then,
they all had four black belts between them. So generally at any one time there were only
one or two black belts in each class. Even some green belts taught basics. But it’s not all
bad, like I said before, sometimes teaching gives people a greater understanding.
At what level do you think we should be steering
students towards beginning to teach?
I think at least at brown belt level. At that point they should be able to show beginners
some basic techniques. But you need to actually show them exactly what you want them
to teach and also give them a couple of tips on teaching. I remember doing a coaching
course under sports England once and the instructor was a guy called Frank Dick and he
was Davy Thompson’s coach, the famous Decathlon athlete who won consecutive gold at
two Olympic games. So obviously with the decathlon you’ve got ten different events you
need to be able to coach for. You have to be able to have your athlete run long distance,
jump really high, jump long and throw with different techniques and all the other various
things you have to do in the decathlon. So basically Frank Dick was giving us lots of tips
on coaching different things, but one useful thing he said that has always stuck with me is
that when you are teaching class, that you have to think in your head that half of the students are deaf and that half the students are blind. So you have to demonstrate everything for the deaf people, because they can’t hear you. So if you can’t demonstrate they’ll
never get it and sometimes you need to choose a student who can do it, maybe if its a Jodan Mawashi Geri and you can’t kick high, pick as student who can to demonstrate. Then
you would say this is what I want, this is how I want it done. Then for the people who are
blind, you have to