OP
OP
Ironbear24
Senior Master
Way to split hairs.
"I didn't expect to get punched in the face."
- Thread starter Ironbear24
- Start date
Way to split hairs.
That's not splitting hairs, I was parodying you.
OP
OP
Ironbear24
Senior Master
Showing/teaching are not the same thing, I get that, I meant it as teaching though.
Did you cry? Lol
Expert planning.
Juany118
Senior Master
No but I grabbed my head, cursed like a son of a ***** and then eventually said "yeah...that was stupid" lol
Btw Autocorrect on my phone sucks replace "left" with "laughed". We are going to get hurt, accidents happen, laughing about accidents and legit mistakes is simply bad form though.
Mattattack
Yellow Belt
Yeah, getting hit with a Kali stick is a sharper kind of pain than getting punched. I got cracked in the right thumb with one a couple weeks ago and I still feel it (good thing I'm a leftie!)
I used to think this looked like excessive protection. Now I know better.
I used to think this looked like excessive protection. Now I know better.
You get it NOW, after it's been pointed out but your friend wasn't taught, not in the very first lesson, he was shown then you laughed at him and get snotty because he didn't come back. Most of us wouldn't come back either, poor instruction and bad reactions from students of whom more might be expected.
Yeah, I took some private lessons in FMA for a while. I remember doing some fairly fast (for me) 2-man double-stick work with my instructor, and he missed slightly, cracking me on the hand. Damned fine disarm, that was.Yeah, getting hit with a Kali stick is a sharper kind of pain than getting punched. I got cracked in the right thumb with one a couple weeks ago and I still feel it (good thing I'm a leftie!)
I used to think this looked like excessive protection. Now I know better.
I'll even go so far as to say the hit was something he'd probably have gotten over pretty quickly. That kind of stuff can happen. But the response to his comment probably led him to believe that's what he could expect the next class, and the next, and the next...
Agreed, there's a lot of things that happen in a martial arts class that could elicit laughter from the ignorant. Falling over when doing a front kick is quite common among beginners and can easily happen to the more experienced. It's mortifying when you do it first time but if everyone around you is cool, just tells you it happens to everyone and doesn't laugh at you then there's no problem.
Making people feel small even if they did do something silly or said something you think is silly is not a nice way to behave either in or out of martial arts.
Agreed. We laugh a LOT at mistakes in my classes (far less formal than the schools I trained at), but we all laugh at them - including the person making them.
But, I bet if you ask him, that wasn't his perception. There's a quote about communication I like: You may think you know what I meant, but what you heard wasn't what I said. Applies here, too, I'm pretty confident. You were laughing at his words -- but his pride had been wounded, and he'd been hit (in this day and age, possibly for the first time in his life!). You weren't laughing with him, you weren't laughing at his words -- you were laughing at HIM.
We do a quite a bit of laughing in our school but it's the type of laugh that someone would give to let you know that everything is already and that what happened wasn't a big deal. It's a short laugh that usually ends with a smile and some words of reassurance. I think the only time we don't laugh is when someone gets seriously hurt and when we see that someone is having a really difficult time with something.
With kids I personally go to the length of me intentionally acting as if I have a similar difficulty as the child to really drive in the value of determination and the lesson of "If I work hard enough I can get better." Not sure if they ever notice my improved performance the following class, but for that moment they are able to turn inward and focus on getting better and pushing through, instead of focusing on the fact that they didn't get something right or that something is difficult.
I practice in a less formal school as well and laughing at and with people isn't bad. For our school it's how and when someone laughs that is monitored. I guess you can say that we laugh more like family members laugh at each other. Now that I've said that I don't think we laugh at another student until they reach a certain level of comfort with us. That relationship has to be there so that the laughing isn't misunderstood.
The first time a new student loses their balance, falls over or mistimes something and it doesn't work they are mortified, how everyone deals with it is important, a smile, a bit of 'hey we all do that' and the student is smiling, the next time they laugh and everyone laughs with them because we have all done it. Students should feel they can make mistakes, mess up techniques and no one judges them or laughs at them, we've all been in their situation after all. It may have taken quite a bit of screwing up courage to come through the doors for some people and they should be encouraged to stay, we aren't all macho warriors to whom martial arts come naturally, most of us have to work at it.
Thinking about this, obviously I am prone to falling over, but to be honest, no one ever actually laughed at me. It was like "you alright mate" Come to the conclusion that this thread has lost me. Maybe getting back up was a subconscious mark to others, with the message don't worry about it, me and them. Anyway, some of it was funny as hell 
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