Something changed...

[DavidCC]

Inviting a yellow belt to train for an instructor's postion sounds like somebody needs to make a car payment. or maybe the IRS came calling...

 

[cy1982]

My opinions on this:

BBC is marketing tactic, I loath it personally as a person, as a buisness perspective, its a great cash cow.
Leadership club sounds like your teacher doesnt want to deal with kids, as it is tiring.(Even if you like kids, its tiring). I know many people who hired qualified black belts with 4 Dan to teach kids.

Either way, from the short information you gave. I would suggest looking for another dojang if you can, (Your stuck with a 1 year contract though I suppose right?) Usually you can find a 3-5days a week dojang for a flat fee. a couple them also have a weight room and more!

 

[Tryak]

BBC is marketing tactic, I loath it personally as a person, as a buisness perspective, its a great cash cow.

While I can't speak for the original poster's club I would have to personally disagree with you. BBC for my school does not bring in additional club money. In fact you get a discount on gear and you attend extra classes at no charge. It is basically for people who have committed to tkd enough to want to go for black belt as opposed to people there for fun/fitness that don't care as much about rank progression.

Leadership club sounds like your teacher doesnt want to deal with kids, as it is tiring.(Even if you like kids, its tiring). I know many people who hired qualified black belts with 4 Dan to teach kids.

Again my dojang has a leadership club and it is by invitation only to members of the BBC. They have special meetings to learn about instructing but color belts are not allowed to teach senior students and they are more about leading warmup exercises and holding pads/bags than they are about instructing in how to perform certain moves - that is left up to the 3rd dan+ instrutors.


So not all dojangs with BBC/leadership is a bad thing. It helps our club to provide people with a more tailored program and have someone to help administrate activities when a larger group shows up on a certain day. Plus it is helping gear students towards one day becoming instructors.

 

[tellner]

Yes it does, but you also get extra attention and training.

Whenever you see Black Belt Clubs and Leadership Teams read "Marketing" and "Money". It separates the people in the Club from everyone else. It makes them feel special and conditions them to buy more favors and status later on. If you have to pay extra money to get the teacher's attention and his or her best effort in teaching you that tells you something about the school. What it tells you is not very nice. I would go so far as to say it's disgraceful. If a student is putting in the time and effort she deserves the same in return.

...I have to admit, seeing your Master Instructers drive around in Hummers and Porche's isn't telling us good things about where our money goes.
But also, on certain training camps the BBC and Leadership teams get a BIG discount on the fees.

Martial arts schools, are just about the worst moneymakers around. When they generate enough for the instructors to make up for real or imagined physical inadequacies with very expensive cars it says something else.

By calling you "leaders" they're stroking your egos and getting you to do their work. What's more, they're making you pay for the privilege. And they're getting you to do their job before you've even mastered the material much less been taught how to instruct let alone how to teach little children. Consider Mark Twain's story about Tom Sawyer and the Fence.

He had had a nice, good, idle time all the while - plenty of company - and the fence had three coats of whitewash on it! If he hadn’t run out of whitewash, he would have bankrupted every boy in the village.

 

[jks9199]

Do play Devil's advocate, the 2nd Dan could easily be doing an exercise wrong e.g. kicking of front foot when the exercise is back foot or something. In this case I don't see any problem with anybody, regardless of grade, correcting a senior (many dan grades get lazy with listening to instructors depict exercises but that is another topic).

If the yellow belt was correcting the 2nd Dan's technique, well that is a bit odd.

On the whole though, it sounds like your friend is a typical boss wannabe....the ones you never want to be boss

Even so, there's a right way and a wrong way to do it. If the person is bragging about it later -- I suspect they did it the wrong way.

Wrong way:
A few years back, during a clinic, my instructor noticed another person was doing an exercise incorrectly. He told me to go over, and tell the person. That person was senior to me -- significantly so. I rushed over, and said something to the effect of "Do it this way, not that way." I ended up having to make an apology...

Rig way:
What I should have done is said "Teacher wanted me to tell you to do it this way."

Were I to notice on my own that a senior was doing something improperly, I would use a question ("Didn't he say this is left foot forward?") to deflect any criticism...

Sounds like someone's got an ego problem...

 

[Tryak]

Whenever you see Black Belt Clubs and Leadership Teams read "Marketing" and "Money". It separates the people in the Club from everyone else. It makes them feel special and conditions them to buy more favors and status later on. If you have to pay extra money to get the teacher's attention and his or her best effort in teaching you that tells you something about the school. What it tells you is not very nice. I would go so far as to say it's disgraceful. If a student is putting in the time and effort she deserves the same in return.

That's not always how it is. Anyone in our club can get private lessons or special attention. But a lot of the students do not WANT to go to class more than twice a week. BBC just means students have specifically indicated they want to come to the 4 classes a week. I have never seen them get extra attention and none of them pay extra money. Every student that puts the time and effort in gets the same attention.

Martial arts schools, are just about the worst moneymakers around. When they generate enough for the instructors to make up for real or imagined physical inadequacies with very expensive cars it says something else.

My instructor just took a team to Italy on the club's dime and drives a 10 year old mini-van so he can pick up some of the kids that don't have rides. They aren't all like that.

By calling you "leaders" they're stroking your egos and getting you to do their work. What's more, they're making you pay for the privilege. And they're getting you to do their job before you've even mastered the material much less been taught how to instruct let alone how to teach little children. Consider Mark Twain's story about Tom Sawyer and the Fence.

Actually those in leadership club are never referred to differently than other students and while they are being taught how to instruct they are not instructors and never act in that capacity.

 

[GlassJaw]

My opinions on this:

BBC is marketing tactic, I loath it personally as a person, as a buisness perspective, its a great cash cow.

Sounds to me like it is, instead, just additional study opportunities offered to students whose demonstrated physical potential and/or dedication to learning suggests that they might benefit well from an accelerated practice schedule.

I suspect that the extra practices could be any or all of:

• mostly run without much instruction, with activities focusing on practicing techniques they've already learned in the regular class, or
• devoted to introducing supplemental things (like extra SD or weapons training) that are not part of the regular curriculum or needed for advancement, or
• focused on physical conditioning

Not all students are interested in or have time for extra practices. Not all students are self-motivated enough to act accordingly when told "Use the next twenty minutes to work individually or in groups on the stuff you've learned for your next testing". Not all students are attentive enough to gain much from a fast-paced instructional class that doesn't pause frequently to answer questions. Nor are all students up for extended physical workouts, especially ones that push them a lot harder than regular class.

Leadership club sounds like your teacher doesnt want to deal with kids, as it is tiring.(Even if you like kids, its tiring).

I kinda doubt that it's quite like that. (However, the Porsche/Hummer comment certainly does give me pause. Maybe there's a wealthy spouse?) Granted, using the term "leadership" does sound like it might be an attempt to give the group an inflated sense of importance.

At the school I'm in, everyone is expected to help their peers and those of lower rank (which is, of course, not unusual). Some have a knack for it; some do not. But it is something that is strongly encouraged and even expected of us.

I can see how a school might want a program to make the best use out of those who have the knack. If you have a question about your poomse or dojang etiquette, you know you're welcome to approach any of the students with the Leadership Club patch declaring "Ask me anything! If it's outside my training, I will help find someone who knows the answer".

It's not necessarily that an instructor tires of answering everyone's questions, it's that it's an inefficient use of class resources if every question has to go through the instructor, especially when there are a dozen other students in the class who are perfectly capable of helping (and some of whom are even somewhat trained to do so).

An aside on instructing:
In our school, black belts (and, I believe, first gups) participate in a mandatory instructor certification seminar (annually?). No one can run a practice without the certification.

I suspect that the course covers things like techniques of teaching, limits of authority, responsibilities, special rules regarding teaching minors, problem solving, etc. It might also require previous first aid and CPR training. Don't know for sure. . .it's beyond my rank.

Anyway, teaching is regarded as an obligation a student assumes when accepting a black belt rank in our dojang.

I guess the basic idea in our school is that it doesn't matter how much you're paying to be there, everyone else's training has priority over your own. If you think other students and their needs cramp your style, then you probably shouldn't have joined a school. Expect to work with them on their training just as your seniors worked on yours. Don't expect fast-track "me-first" training without hiring a personal instructor.

Dan

 

[exile]

This episode sounds like something related to what the German term schadenfreude denotes, an attitude which a good friend and colleague formulates this way:

Success is not enough—friends must fail.

It's a nasty way of thinking, but it's far more common than most people will admit. And I don't know that people who are prone to it ever really evolve out out it.... in my experience, it says something very fundamental about the person who habitually experiences it. People like that are on no one's side but their own, basically, and they stay that way.

 

[Tez3]

This episode sounds like something related to what the German term schadenfreude denotes, an attitude which a good friend and colleague formulates this way:

Success is not enough—friends must fail.

It's a nasty way of thinking, but it's far more common than most people will admit. And I don't know that people who are prone to it ever really evolve out out it.... in my experience, it says something very fundamental about the person who habitually experiences it. People like that are on no one's side but their own, basically, and they stay that way.

We have a couple of people like that at work sadly. There is promotion available if you want it, not all of us do as it means getting away from the job and more into admin. However what these couple of people don't seem to realise is that we are very happy being Indians and we don't want to be Chiefs so we get comments from them along the lines of the OPs from her friend. The worse bit is that to make themselves look good they constantly put others down. They don't work hard and say to the boss, look this is what I've done instead they point at someone who's made a mistake or is struggling with a case and say oh look, they aren't doing very well are they? The inference being that they are better by comparison.
Makes me mad I admit!

 

[Logan]

For the prosecution....It is true that the 2nd Dan could be doing an exercise wrong, but it is not the yellow belt's place to correct her. If if the 2nd Dan is wrong, having a belt that much lower correct her sets a VERY bad example and sends a message to other students that the black belt might not know what she is doing. There is also a good possibility that she is doing the exercise that way for a reason. Example, there are tens of possibilities for how to execute a roundhouse kick. A 2nd Dan has probably learned many of them, the yellow belt has probably learned one....Either way, correcting Dans is an instructor's job.

Deaf has it right, remember who you are there for.

And as PEP-REP said, new rank goes to people's heads quite often, let it be a lesson for you on how NOT to behave.

Not disagreeing with this BUT there are basic things that even an observer could pick up. If the instructor says "begin with a kick of the front foot" and a higher grade does not, it does not matter that the black belt knows what they are doing - they are not doing what the instructor asked. Higher grades should set an example. It is better to admit that then pretend otherwise.

This person sounds egotistic imo though.

 

[Logan]

Even so, there's a right way and a wrong way to do it. If the person is bragging about it later -- I suspect they did it the wrong way.
...

Were I to notice on my own that a senior was doing something improperly, I would use a question ("Didn't he say this is left foot forward?") to deflect any criticism...

Sounds like someone's got an ego problem...

I agree.