When I began
teaching karate in 1969, it was not so
easy for me. Really not ready and a relatively new Shodan, I was teaching exactly how I had been most
recently taught, as a brown belt. I was
too intense for my students at the Scranton Boys Club, and except for my
original 3 students, the Blackwell brothers who had also trained under my
instructor Charles Murray, my other new students left by the end of 3 months.
Lucky for me my
wife was a Physical Education instructor, her specialty was in coaching girls
swim teams.
She patiently
explained how I needed to listen or hear what my students were actually telling
me and how to adjust the training to what I was seeing.
She then showed
me her college texts on coaching girls swim teams.
Reality check,
the college texts from the 1960's about how to coach a Jr High Girls Swim Team,
my wife studied in college, are still more complete than most karate texts I
have read. She studied those texts back in the 1960s's. Just saying.
Those
Jr. High Girls Swim Team textbooks had a great deal of relevant knowledge for
the students of coaching. Not just swimming techniques. They included coaching
knowledge from across the country being shared to help everyone so trained to
succeed. Not just tips of one coaching style. They addressed best nutritional
practices, anatomy and physiology for the swimmer student, approaches to teaching and coaching the
student.
While the
standard karate text addresses the technical requirements of the style, rarely
are the other issues considered.
The difference
is the sharing of information for everyone’s benefit that the college system
utilizes to develop coaches.
IMO much karate
writing could benefit if such things were shared and addressed.
So I got a new
group of students at the Scranton Boys Club, applied what she showed me to
teaching karate to kids, it worked out and that is how I moved forward.
And I learned a
lesson, one that each student teaches the instructor. For my next 40+ years I
kept learning from students.
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