First-Person Narrator

Tucson Chayon-Ryu is having a yard sale to raise money so that a couple of my students can go to Houston to test for their black belts. We started today, and did pretty well despite it being miserably hot out. I got sunburned on my forearms, which I always forget to protect (you'd think I'd learn), but I wore my hat all day and the rest of me is fine.

My calculator, however, MELTED.



Guys, it wasn't even in direct sunlight! It was in a little box under the table where we had all the books, in the shade.

I was pretty fond of that one, too. :(

I think I sprained my big toe during sparring tonight.

...I am so awesome.

ow

The rank test on Saturday went reasonably well. We had one student meltdown during the test, and one after, but everyone did very well generally. After the test, Master Hwang gave a little speech, and then I gave a littler speech (trying not to cry the whole time), and now I'm officially the head of the Tucson branch of Chayon-Ryu, I guess. Woah.

So, anyway. Here are some old photos that I scanned while I was working on her retirement present!
( Cut for biiiig pictures! )

I've been going through old photos to help put together displays for our new dojang (by the way, I've updated the site a bit more, for those who want to see what we're up to), and I found a few pictures that I thought you all might enjoy. First, a nice shot of my eyebrow after my famous board-to-head injury at age 15, taken the day after (which will not be going on display anywhere near the dojang, but which I think is cool):



And here's me breaking two boards with a sidekick at my first black belt test (I think I was 16?):



And a brick at my test for second dan (...I have lost all track of time. 18? I'm pretty sure I took the pre-test when I was still in high school, because I remember hauling the brick to class):



Somewhere, there's a picture of me breaking a brick at my pre-test for second degree where you can see my hand actually passing through the brick, but I haven't found it yet. Maybe it'll turn up as I keep looking.

I just taught my last Saturday class at the YMCA. I took over that class time back when I was a freshman in college, when it was actually on Wednesday evenings. It was my first unsupervised teaching experience, and I started out with just a handful of white belts. Over the years, I built it up into a class covering white through blue belts, used it to train other good teachers, and learned so much myself that I was given the responsibility of two or three classes of my very own every week.

I'm really gonna miss it, and I'm furious at the Y for canceling our program, particularly with so little notice.

I'm not the only one. One of my students, a little girl who started with us a couple years ago, when she was about the same age I was back when I started training, gave me a copy of a letter she wrote, today:

Dear Lohse "Family" YMCA,
I am unhappy with you because you canceled karate. Why did you cancel karate? Karate was a great thing for the whole family! I was learning self-discipline, getting stronger and I was having fun. I was planning on becoming a black belt one day. Now that dream may never come true. I am very sad about that! I want you to know that you have disappointed a lot of kids and their families.

I love my students, and I care about their training, and about what they're getting from martial arts beyond the ability to do a few forms and break some boards. The YMCA, apparently, doesn't.

Hopefully, that shocking and disappointing indifference won't damage our school too much as we try to regroup and find a way to continue serving our students.

Dad emailed me a picture that was taken with his digital camera at the rank test last Saturday.
( Click for Pic! )

Class tonight was unusually large, especially for a Thursday. As usual, the step aerobics class that has the room before us didn’t clear out on time, and so we were starting about three minutes later than we should have. Adding to the bustle and confusion, we had one little boy taking his third lesson, and two kids who just started tonight, none of whom (predictably) knew quite what to do or when to do it.

I think it came off pretty well, though. After warm-ups, I split the more experienced students into two groups, and gave each group to one of the Gubernick brothers, upon whom I can always count for some good, solid instruction. I took the newest kids, and had Jose-Luis Cañez, who is ten and a purple belt, observe, so that he could learn to teach our first lesson skills. There were a bunch of parents observing, which I like. I love teaching kids, but they don’t get my sense of humor much at all – a shame, because I like to make jokes the whole time I’m demonstrating stuff. Their parents do get it, and when they can overhear me while I’m teaching (or when they’ve become actual students, themselves), I tend to feel a little more engaged with the whole thing. Which is good, because I’ve been teaching first lesson for something like ten years now, and anything that can spice it up is a plus.

After forty-five minutes, we brought the whole class together in a big circle, and did some controlled sparring in the middle. The newest students watched, but everyone else got a chance to spar at least once – even me. Energy was really high, and everyone seemed enthusiastic and excited even during warm-downs. It was a good class.

Then I went up the stairs, pulled the “KARATE” binder (not quite an accurate label, but whatcha gonna do?) out so that I could fill in my time, and found out, by way of a printed note, that our supervisor (whom I’ve never met, by the way) wants to change our Tuesday start time from 6:00 to 6:45, and cut our class by half an hour.

Most of our students are children, many of them quite young. When we first started at this building, our class time was 5:30. It’s been rolling back steadily ever since. Last time, when we gave up the first half hour of our Thursday class to eternally-late-running-step-aerobics, it was implied that it would only be a temporary adjustment. That was a couple of years ago.

I know the Y looks on us as something of a money-sink. I don’t think anyone in charge is happy that there are two martial arts instructors on the payroll, now, even though my rate is lower than Master Hwang’s, and since I tend to teach more classes per month, they really should think of it as a savings. I know they have trouble collecting the monthly fees from the students – which, y’know, might have something to do with the difficulty they have in implementing their automated credit card billing system, just a little bit, but which they’d rather blame on us, even though we’ve never been responsible for collecting fees.

But I don’t understand how making our class more inconvenient – seriously, how many kids between the ages of six and ten are going to be able to attend a class that doesn’t let out until 7:45 on a school night? – is going to help with that.

Grandmaster Kim Soo came to visit with Master Hwang and Master Martin, and train with all of us at the Tucson Dojang, today. Master Hwang, Mom, and I will be having a more private lesson with him tomorrow, too (while Master Martin and Jameson prepare us some dinner [in a very manly fashion, I have no doubt]). Exciting stuff!

It's always nice to have him visit Tucson Branch, because we're far enough away from Houston that most of our students would never get a chance to meet him before going for their black belt tests, if he didn't come out every few years. And I think it's good for them to meet him, and have a little lesson, even though it's always sort of necessarily short and shallow. He has an amazing presence, an even though he tends to do several of the same demonstration exercises each time - meaning I've seen them three or four times each, now - I'm always affected anew by the deeper ramifications of what he's saying when he talks about such simple things as breathing, aim, and eye contact.

Probably my favorite thing about training with Grandmaster Kim, though, is that even when it turns out that I've been doing something all wrong, I never feel embarassed to have him correct me. It's hard to describe, but it seems to me that he's mastered the technique of giving correction on honest mistakes without making the erring student feel that the mistakes are a mark of poor character, or anything like that (I am making a distinction here between the kind of mistake that comes from misunderstanding, as opposed to the kind of mistake that comes from bad attitude, which topic could well be a post all on its own). And maybe this is only true of me - maybe other students are hideously embarassed when Grandmaster corrects them. I don't really have a way of knowing that.

But I hope that I'll get to where he is, as a teacher, someday.

I sparred at full speed and power for the first time since my toenail surgery, tonight. Only for one round, but damn did that ever feel good.

One of these days, I'm going to write a really interesting and insightful post about consensual violence and what it means to me to be able to enter a safe space to hit and be hit every week. Because while I do martial arts in part for fitness, in part for a sort of spiritual harmony that it provides me, and in part as a way to learn and practice useful self-defense techniques that might someday come up in real life (and for other reasons I'm not really coherent enough to detail right now, but you get the idea) - I also do martial arts in large part because I really, truly, genuinely enjoy fighting.

Not beating someone up. Not being beat up. Hurting and being hurt a little, yes, but not in a mean way, if that makes any sense.

It probably doesn't make any sense (though those of you who also train may be nodding your heads), which is why I shouldn't try to capture this thought I've had for a while when I'm tired both mentally and physically, and also wound up and pumped full of adrenalin. So I'm just gonna do the short version:

I love sparring. I missed it.

The lowerbelt class today was pretty so-so. Two kids were half an hour late (to a one hour class), and the others were not super-attentive. They all got a little something out of it, though, so it wasn't a complete loss.

The upperbelt class, now... In attendance were myself, my mother (2nd dan black belt), Andre (1st dan black belt), Sam (1st dan black belt), and Ann (2nd gup brown). Sam's the youngest, at 17 (his birthday was Thursday, in fact), which means that the class was composed entirely of brown-and-above more-or-less-adults.

AWESOME.
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