First time teaching

Our main instructor is extremely busy with a new business, so the assistant instructor has been handling the classes since the start in September. However, now the assistant instructor is on holidays for a week and a half, so new some of the rest of us at the club are taking on instructing responsibilities in the mean time.

I was asked to teach on Oct 11, but there are two others who will be teaching the next two classes that the assistant instructor is still away for. I think I was only offered one day because the main instructors didn't want me to have a bad experience with the first and then still be responsible for the next two classes as well.

As it turns out, the class went really really well. I didn't do it all on my own, however, and that's what made it work out the best. A fellow karateka, Bill, helped watch the white belt kids who need to be supervised and hounded to pay attention and not disturb others, which helped a lot because it allowed me to pay better attention to the intermediate students and allowed me to separate the techniques that they all practiced.

It's always nice to be able to tell the white belts to do white belt things, while getting the more advanced students to execute more advanced combinations. This is one thing I feel has been missing in our club, largely because the white belts haven't been separated from the rest of the class enough. Bill and I agreed that the classes would be much better if the white belts WERE separated, however, as they really do bring down the complexity of the class for the rest of the students.

After standard warmup and initial basics, we split the gym up with a big curtain and Bill worked with the white belts on his own on one side while a junior brown belt by the name of Adam and myself worked with the colored belts on the other side. Adam handled the yellow-to-green belts to go through Heian Nidan and basics for yellow to green belt testings, and I took on the purple belts to go through Heian Godan, since a couple of the low purples are thinking of testing for high purple come December.

There were 24 people in the first class, and everyone seems to have gotten a good workout, and even the kids were more disciplined when they lined up to be dismissed from class, after Bill had been standing over them, making sure they participated properly instead of just lolling around. One of the parents came up and thanked Bill for the disciplined instruction, which was another pat on the back for us both, aside from what we'd already seen as improvement in the class due to the white belt segregation.

Bill and I chatted for a bit before and after class about how to improve our club, because right now we really do have a few undisciplined white belts that bring down the quality of the class for the higher ranks, and our higher ranks are moving very slowly up the ranks as a partial result. Unless they stay for the second class, they're not going to get much of a chance to work on their testing material, and even if they DO stay for the second class, the odds are we will be working on material that is way above their current point and doesn't help them directly for their own testings.

Bill and I are going to talk to the assistant instructor when he returns and suggest that we take turns taking on the kids and separating them from the colored belts. I think this is a way that we could motivate some of the kids to pay more attention, because once they get to a certain level of proficiency we could "graduate" them to the main class as a reward.

At any rate, it was a great experience, and it'll now be interesting to see the two others who are going to be instructing while our assistant instructor is gone - the guy who is teaching tomorrow morning is someone who has basically never trained at our club and is largely unknown by the students, and the guy who is teaching next Tuesday is hardly any better in terms of attending our club regularly or being known, etc.

Everyone liked my class from the feedback I got, and I certainly liked doing it. I wonder when my next opportunity will be??