Instructor I

Another day and more unsolicited email messages show up in my inbox. Several Martial Arts organizations marketing groups are always trying to sell me information about becoming a better instructor. Of course from what I teach and how I teach it they information is useless to me, except to keep me current with the latest martial school trends. I do pay attention to try and understand the landscape, always watching and thinking.

I started my own program almost immediately after reaching my sho-dan in Isshinryu. Unequipped for the role of course, I had never studied karate to become an instructor, I only wanted to learn karate and get better. As events shaped my karate experience I began teaching to remain an Isshinryu practitioner, and had to work to define what my program would be.

For one thing I started out teaching a youth program through the Scranton Boys Club, for free. My program was the first one to bring girls into the Boys Club for membership. As I learned how to be an instructor, the hardest way, I tried to focus what I wanted my program to represent and settled upon trying to move into a pre-1900 approach to individual training. Always the most important focus was that between student and instructor.

In my past 30 years of teaching, perhaps in some ways I’ve succeeded. In other ways I was way ahead of the bell curve, such as seriously teaching a youth program, years before it even became a reality on Okinawa. Back in the days when everyone thought I was out in space training youth, almost all telling me I should be spending my time with adults to do real karate. I tried to tell them what the future would hold if they wanted to keep their programs going, but few thought I was serious. Of course today there are very few commercial schools in any art that would be open without the income that their youth programs generate. Then again my focus wasn’t money, for I’ve never charged for my instruction. My payment was being allowed to continue training and I’ve been very well paid at that.

I plan to do a series of articles on my personal insight into instructor development. Not to guide other programs, but to share with my students in what we practice.

Still to begin I think it very important to realize that ALL of us, trying to link our programs to the karate of the past must realize, what we’ve turned into is very different from Okinawa’s origins. Very different!

Karate pre-1900, as far as I’ve been able to piece together, was before the dojo, perhaps just a back yard or an empty field or clearing in the forest. I’ve been unable to piece together much information about how many students an instructor had, how frequently they trained, what their drop off rate may have been, and without information to discuss those items is mostly speculation.

Karate pre-1900 was a walking student population. The student(s) lived a walking distance from the instructor. Of course in that world time, the populace walked, there weren’t cars, or much other available transportation. Walking distance might be 10 miles for the most possessed student, but still I suspect a neighborhood type of distance in many cases.

The stories seem to indicate that unless it was from a family or friend obligation, a prospective student had to work to be accepted. That might represent being turned down repeatedly, or having to present oneself for many months showing one’s true interest before being accepted. It suggests a small student population that worked very hard to be accepted, and in turn willing to stay training.

Just supposition, but for a successful instructor today (defined as one who keeps their school open for years), with thousands of new students, who didn’t stay even to sho-dan, for the handful who move into fuller training, I’m sure those older instructors would look askance as to what a good instructor meant.

I’m not suggesting right or wrong, just the world keeps turning and change happens (entropy is the universal champion after all). But it is difficult to truly consider the modern instructor an inheritor of the older traditions.

The body may move the same, and the same steps must pass in a students studies, but the wrap around of today, hardly allows an instructor to focus on their program in the same way as when there were a handful of students.

The change of course is world wide, and includes Okinawa too. Can you consider any pre-1900 instructor would have considered running a world spanning organization with students they never taught, as a part of their art?

Trying to understand the trends of the past are useful to help us shape our art and our responses to guide our students into their own futures.

In my case I had to work out how to develop a youth program for a small group of students that would require between 7 to 9 years of training to qualify for sho-dan, and then of course they would leave us forever, and separately develop an adult program that is I believe very close to what a pre-1900 model of training may have been.

I will continue exploring what developing an instructor should represent in subsequent posts.