eveglass | Life lessons from the dojo (Reply)

Life lesson #27: Watching is good, doing is better

Our dojo is quite small, so when we get a lot of people showing up for class, it's sometimes hard to fit them all in. Yesterday was one of those days. The sensei's solution was to have the white belts get up and perform a kata, then they'd sit down and the coloured belts would perform a kata, then the white belts would get up again, and so on. I totally understand the sensei's reasons: the coloured belts can help correct the white belts, the white belts can familiarize themselves with higher-belt katas, the coloured belts feel that they've gotten at least some instruction geared to their level... That said, I'm not sure it's the best use of class resources. For one thing, every time you sit down, you cool down and lose your momentum. For another, while "familiarization" is well and good, you don't really learn a kata until you try doing it.

At my last dojo, the sensei would have everyone do the warm-ups together, and then he'd break the class into small groups (2-5 people), generally divided by belt level, each of them working on something appropriate for their rank. He'd either spend most of his time with the white belts (who needed the most supervision) or circulate around the class, helping out where necessary. It worked remarkably well, because every student was working for pretty much the entire class. I think if I'm ever in charge of a dojo, that's how I'm going to run my classes.

Life lesson #28: Being observed yields mixed results

Anyone who's ever been observed on the job knows this one. You might be puttering along quite happily most of the time, but the second you've got an evaluator watching you, you get nervous. You become self-conscious. Your technique suffers. During some of the "white belts doing katas / coloured belts sitting" parts of yesterday's class, each white belt were paired up with a coloured belt whose job was to observe them and give feedback. I was paired up with a black belt, which meant I got great, specific feedback, but it also meant my technique went to hell. As I mentioned in life lesson #22 ("You can only focus on a few things at a time"), it's hard to try to monitor *every* aspect of your technique. So when the black belt noted that I was looking down and that my foot position was off, I made a big effort to correct those two specific things. And I'm *certain* that other things suffered as a trade-off.

Am I better for having been corrected? Probably. But it was damned nerve-wracking while it happened.

Life lesson #29: Real karate is not the Karate Kid

After class yesterday, a whole bunch of us from the dojo went to see the new Karate Kid movie. (I think we sold out the showing, actually.) I'll give this to the kids: they're good. They're really good. Even if some of the more flippy moves are done with wires, a lot of what they were doing was pure skill, and they did it well. That said, a lot of the fighting was classic Hollywood. I've been to enough karate competitions to know that real competition fighting does not look like the final tournament of the Karate Kid, at least not in any of the tournaments I've ever been to. I met up with my sensei and a few of the black belts after the movie, and we all joked that we were adding the new, extravagant moves to our curriculum starting Monday. We knew enough to know that Hollywood karate (excuse me, kung fu) isn't really karate, and I think most reasonable adults understand the concept of suspension of disbelief.

On the other hand, when I left the theatre, I saw tons of little kids doing "karate" moves in the hallway, going out to the car, etc. The movie clearly inspired them. They were psyched! They were ready! Maybe some of them signed up for karate classes. (Though, given that most of the little kids already had siblings in the dojo, they probably would have anyway.) Little kids do not understand suspension of disbelief. No doubt they will, one day. For now, I'm happy to let them dream about karate and kung fu and ninjas and pirates, but I feel bad that real-world karate will never live up to the dreams based on big screen combat.