Naturally, but I mean it moreso in the spirit of what a teacher is willing to go to lengths toward, in training their students. Do we let them dangle and weather the waters, or cut the rope and let them drown? This could be the case with this person eventually.
Maybe it's your teaching that could be a significant part of the blame?
Understand I have never knocked out a student of my own, but when teaching techniques that deliberatelly strike pressure and vital points, and we are practicing heavy contact to those areas (for more advanced practitioners)
Practicing heavy contact to vital points is very, very foolish. There's nothing to be gained from it, and no matter how much control you have, heavy contact is going to be too heavy at one time or another, regardless of protection. I've seen some rather interesting organizations demonstrate that they can take a kick to the groin (a lot of staged stuff involved). What good comes from it?
the threat of being hurt myself is very real. I am training these people to be either as good as myself, or better, and sometimes I have actually had to defend myself where otherwise I would have ended up hospitalized.
If you're constantly being put in such situations, then you need to evaluate what you're doing wrong.
I have read once that as you become more experienced, every trip to the training hall becomes more and more dangerous, until each training session is a serious question of life or death. I don't believe in taking it to that extreme, but I do in the spirit of that ethos.
You're either reading poorly-written material, or have a less than satisfactory understanding of what control really is.
As you get more experienced, your control *should* be getting better. I have no qualms about putting a well-trained brown belt with a student who has had 6 months of experience, simply because the more advanced student is going to have a greater degree of discipline and control compared to the less experienced student, and that the more experienced student knows how to work with the neophytes in a safe manner that encourages good technique.
Furthermore, students shouldn't be free sparring until they have demonstrated that they have at least a fundamental level of control.
But I'll tell you what; one time my leading student and I were sparring. It devolved to the ground, and while I was playing around, he and I continued to escalate (I call it anteing it up) when suddenly he threw his arms around my neck and applied a submission hold, intended to put me unconscious. His reasoning was that he felt endangered after he drew blood from me
Again, if this is what you consider "playing around," where blood gets drawn, you may want to re-consider your methods.
, and I made the statement, 'now lets have fun'. I had no ill intentions and would not have deviated in how we were practicing. It's blood, who cares.
This is an even more reckless statement.
But unfortunantely his fear caused him to suddenly go into survival mode, and I found myself with a very strong set of arms around my neck, attempting to choke me out.
You brought this upon yourself. As the senior, it's up to *you* to slow things down, not to taunt your student. If you don't know how to spar with less experienced students safely, then perhaps you should consider getting more training.
Pretty much everything wrong.
Out of instinct, and luckily many years of Hapikido training, I grabbed him by the hair and threw him over my shoulder. Many in Hapkido have the hip torque to easily throw people with just that alone, so even seated it is possible to lift the person and throw them.
Once again, this demonstrates the lack of self-control (both physical and mental) on your part, and the lack of the ability to control the pace of a sparring session with a student.
Well, he landed somewhat hard, and had the breath knocked out of him until he regained a sense of control, or composure. At most he was stunned. I do not believe I acted wrongly
First of all, you're lucky that it was just a "stunned" situation. You made the mistake of taunting, when you should have been encouraging him to slow things down, since that's what he needed.
, not past what needed to be done to get him off me. In my book, if I lose consciousness it is risking death, and I will not allow it. He crossed a boundary extending sparring and shadow boxing to being a very real and dangerous thing, and sometimes our students will do that.
If such a thing happens once in a long while, I understand that things can sometimes get heated, and fluke occurrences can occur.
If your students do that on a regular basis, then again, there's something dreadfully wrong with your teaching. You're not teaching them self-control, self-restraint, and discipline, and even worse, you are not practicing those very critical things yourself.
The first thing you should do is to stop and think about why you constantly get into these negative situations.
The next thing you should do is change your behavior, so that you avoid such situations. The best defense against a fight is for the fight not to happen.
The next thing is that you need to get some in-depth study on the martial arts. If, by your own assertion, you have almost 20 years of training in the martial arts and several black belt rankings, then you should have already had the focus and discipline to do the right thing. Maybe it's time to go back, and train, so that you can improve things, especially when it comes to character, discipline, focus, and common sense. Now that you're older than when you first started, maybe you'll reap more rewards from it this time around.
