Teachers and students

In martial arts, everything begins with the body. First, one gets acquainted with it, and slowly becomes intimate with it. The body is transformed into the best ally of the spirit. Then spirit and body become one. -Daniele Bolelli, On The Warrior’s Path




Cindy randomly came in at lunchtime today just for kicks, and worked with Jim and me. I wore the baby-blanket gi. She pronounced it "Super intimidating" and the fact that it's a Bad Boy just makes it better.

I asked her to go over that gi choke that I was having trouble with. I think now that what was happening was that I was letting the guy get his arm out during or immediately after the roll. If I end the roll with a good tight hold on the opponent's bicep, s/he can't go anywhere. As far as that hand, it doesn't necessarily have to end up palm on the mat- it can be behind the opponent's head. I just have to make sure everything is tight-tight-tight and I don't leave any room for hir to wiggle around. I want to tap somebody out with this choke as soon as possible.

We practiced the same techniques from Monday. I'm still having trouble climbing my feet up the opponent's back. I also had a challenge triangling Jim. He is really big. The armbar was sweet, though. This is some thigh workout on a large guy. The muscles were burning.

Then positional sparring from open guard. Jim was not allowed to use his hands when I was in his guard, but he still managed to bull me over and mount me a couple of times. I like open guard and generally do okay at it, but it's a *LOT* harder in no-gi. Cindy wants me to back the heck OUT of a big guy's guard and disengage as soon as I can. I tend to lunge back in because I'm fixated on trying to slide my knee over his thigh and pass right up the center.... half the time he's closing me back into his guard again. Cindy wants me to try more variety in passes and not constantly be straining to charge right up the center, especially with big guys.

Cindy was giving me a hard time for not popping my knee up as soon as I had a sliver of room in Jim's closed guard.
"You're being too NICE again!"
"I don't want to push his testicles out through his nose!"
"If he chose to not wear a cup, that's his problem, not yours."
"But I want him to be willing to work with me again tomorrow!"
Jim: "If I come in tomorrow, then I'll WEAR A CUP!!!"

Had one other humorous moment when I was in bottom half guard (surprise surprise!), and Jim reached back to grab my leg to try to pry me off- and there was nothing there. Wide-eyed with surprise, he flailed his arm in empty air and exclaimed, "Oh! Teeny-tiny!" I cracked up. He couldn't even REACH my stubby little legs to try to pry me off.


Thursday evening Kung Fu. I had taken 2 aspirin before BJJ; I took 2 more before kung fu; and after kung fu, yet another pair. That pain originating just central of my right shoulder blade is radiating down my arm to the elbow and also up the back of my skull. I had headaches for much of the day today. I've experienced the radiating-down-the-arm phenomenon before, but the headaches are a new thing. I had my housemate slather some Tiger Balm on it when I got home.

JoE brought in another new student. Marcy has karate experience. As soon as I saw her, though, I exclaimed "You have a FENOM gi!!" She bought it just because it was a distinctive gi to wear to workshops and things- she could say, "I'm the one in the black gi with the big swirly pink F's all over it!" Then she exclaimed, "Have you seen the BLUE one??!" "Yeah, it's releasing TOMORROW!!!" After we finished geeking out about Fenom gi's (while the boys all looked at us bemusedly... I had to explain to them why Fenom gi's are so cool), I asked, "So, you have a BJJ gi but you don't do BJJ... are you INTERESTED in doing BJJ?" SK (rolling eyes): "Already pimping your BJJ school..." She said that she could probably be convinced. Awesome. I don't want to overwhelm her when she's just starting kung fu- but I will have to try to drag her into Cindy's in a month or three.

A few rounds of hand strike drills. One of the things we did was the circular backfist (which we sometimes call by the affectionate moniker of "zipper fist" since the windup looks like you're zipping up your jacket). We usually do most hand strike drills alternately on the left and right. Out of respect for our new students, I had been specifying on the ones *I* picked (unless they were ridiculously simple techniques) "Let's do 10 on one side and then 10 on the other". Nemesis picked the zipper fist, and he called alternating. I remember learning zipper fist- it's not easy- it was several weeks before I could even THINK about trying to do it on alternating sides. The next time somebody picked a technique that was not really easy, I spoke up and said, "Can we do 10 on one side and then 10 on the other?" I talked to SK about this on the way home. Who knows if a new student is quick to pick things up or not... but I tend to think, let's try to keep it simple at first. SK said, "I was trying to get a sense of how fast she was catching on." I said, "If I had had to try to deal with alternating zipper fist on my first class, I might not have come back for a second one. Let's not lose a student by overwhelming them with complexity at the first class, because they might be a slow learner like me."

After hand strike drills, some more kick drills. Then a little of the Five Animals form. New nuances I'm getting: A more pronounced parry with the left hand immediately after the opening Tiger straight punches; and also I need to make sure my stance isn't too narrow going into that forward stance.


Then SK took the two newbies out in the hall, and left the rest of us to spar. I had been complaining to him that I don't like having to spar without teacher supervision... but I don't know if there's any realistic solution to that, since he needs to spend some time with the newbies. Sigh.

Me vs JoE. As always happens, things got too hard and too fast almost immediately. After a while, I ended up taking a moderately hard fist to the right side of the forehead- which did not help my headache.

I sat out (well, LAID out with my hand on my forehead) while JoE sparred Nemesis until Nemesis clocked HIM too hard and it was his turn to limp out. See the problem here? Resolutely, I marched in to face Nemesis. I began by saying, "We really need to go SLOW and LIGHT." That lasted about fifteen seconds. I wasn't doing very well tonight, partly because I was distracted with my headache and upper back pain... but Marcy came back in after a few minutes and was watching us, and I felt like I needed to at the very least display some testicular fortitude, lest she think the women in this class are whimps. So, while not terribly effective, I at least was game and kept charging in on Nemesis.



SK told me that he was discussing with CM the fact that some people are feeling intimidated by sparring, and getting injured. CM (Tiger to the bone) suggested that SK remind us that we were doing a martial art, and that we're going to get hit, and that we need to suck it up. If certain people are hitting too hard, then hit them back HARDER.

While this in a way is a predictable classic Tiger response to this dilemma, it exasperates me (even though I'm a Tiger!!). I just can't buy into the whole concept of "If someone's being too rough in class, just give him a taste of his own medicine." As much as this has some element of justice- and I know it's sort of traditional in MA- I don't think it really teaches effectively. Furthermore, once you start responding to bullying with more bullying, the bully is going to just come back even harder... the end result of this up-the-ante game is that the bigger guy is going to squash the smaller guy in the end. Nemesis has a lot more ante than me. I am not gonna win that one.

Furthermore, it's not as if certain people are getting injured and intimidated because they suck, or because they deserve it, or any other valid reason within their control- they're being injured and intimidated because OTHER PEOPLE- after years of MA training, for cripe's sake- lack physical control of their own techniques, and furthermore can't comprehend the difference between light contact and hard contact. They are the ones with the problem, and their innocent classmates are the ones being saddled with the crippling (in both senses of the term) negative fallout. "Suck it up" is an inadequate and patently unfair solution to this problem.



JM was not present tonight. It was interesting to note how much more at ease I felt with her gone. I really do have some industrial-sized toxic hangups around that girl. I need to analyze them further and figure out some way of dealing with them.

Part of the reason it was nice to have her elsewhere was that I got a rare chance to talk to SK. My enthusiasm for getting a chance to discuss some stuff was dampened by the fact that by the time we got back to the car, I had a roaring headache.... but since I hardly ever get a chance to talk to him, I had to carpe diem.

One thing I stressed was that I (and quite probably some others) really need blatant and regular positive feedback in order to assure ourselves that we don't suck. I guess he decided to start working on that particular piece of advice right away; as he had a number of complimentary things to say about my work. That felt really good.

We talked about the ranking system, testing, etc. The same stuff I've talked about on my blog. I have discussed pieces of this with him before, but tonight I got a chance to give him (I think) a more complete picture. We need to talk about this a lot more- this and other concepts that I'm reading about right now since I'm in the middle of four different books on the topic of learning and teaching. Now he's thinking about talking to the other students and trying to get a picture of how people feel about the ranking system and testing- what they want from it, what works and doesn't work as far as motivating them and making them feel as if they're making progress. Perhaps brushing the dust and mildew off the whole concept, and reworking it for the needs of the current class members.

I am not happy that CM and DD display symptoms of being so out of touch with recognizing and responding to the needs of students who are not like them, and who face challenges different than the ones they themselves faced. These guys are masters, who have been teaching for DECADES. Mama Mia.

SK, who is barely old enough to buy a beer and has been flying by the seat of his pants teaching this tiny ragtag band for about a year, responded to a good bit of my commentary with "That wasn't my experience at all... I didn't realize that people were thinking/feeling X about Y." He- by glaring contrast- is approachable... and listens when I tried to tell him about these things. And now he wants to FIGURE OUT WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT. He's open to hearing ideas, and already has some ideas of his own. He also knew enough to reject a senior teacher's crappy "solutions" for the sparring issues. He is young and inexperienced, and there are some communication lapses that result in him not always having an accurate handle on what is going on with the students (which is at least as much our fault as his)- but that stuff is learnable. He has qualities of a good teacher that these masters of half a lifetime's experience do not have, and have not even figured out that they need.