Why do you teach?

[Old CJ]

I will try to keep this short as possible.
I started teaching as a 'head instructor' when I was a red belt. My original instructor/school owner had all but disappeared, which left me and another red belt teaching all the classes and taking care of the office stuff. With approval from our GM and the class contingent, I found the cheapest place to rent with enough space, relocated the school, and with a Lot of sweat equity from students and family, we started, with a slight name change. Things went very good from the beginning. As you can see, I did not start from scratch student-wise which was a huge benefit.
I was young in my 20's and had worked hard outside of class at my 'regular' job and also had/have a good-sized cattle operation. I had great credit and great backers/financiers. An opportunity came along to purchase the small strip mall the first school was located in, so I bought it. In a nutshell, it allowed me to operate the school with almost no overhead. Five years later, I did the same thing in another part of town and opened our 2nd school. I cannot overstate how many good things and opened doors fell my way in our early years. But to be very clear, it took a LOT of work.
That is a bit of explanation of how our schools got started out.

More to your question, I started out teaching out of necessity and discovered I am pretty darn good at it. In my early years of teaching/learning, I was extremely competitive. I had a crazy busy schedule with a very fulltime job, cattle operation, family, and teaching/owning a school. On top of all this, I had a four-year run of working out with a trainer 5 days/week, 4-5 hours/day to make an Olympic run. It was an insane schedule where I averaged about 4-5 hours sleep per day.
I still had a partner in the school (other original red belt) and he was good at the background office stuff and did a very good job of keeping things going and organized which helped tremendously while I was training.
I would say I absolutely fed off of teaching/training back then. No matter how tired I was from the rest of life, I always looked forward to classes. I have always been self-driven and quite competitive at Everything (my wife can attest). After my competitive days and after I had become quite seasoned in my original style (4th Dan if memory serves) I trained to green sash in Kung Fu, black belt in Shotokan, and 2nd instructor in Kali. I never have been 'tired' with my base style, but I knew there was more to martial arts than my base style, so I wanted to learn more. This also helped keep me engaged in teaching.

I hope I answered your question somewhere in there.

What is A red belt?

 

[Haruhiko]

I looking for honest reasons why people choose to teach MA. More so if you are not a school owner (IE, you teach for someone else), but opinions are welcome from everyone.

What motivates you to teach? How does it support your personal goals? What do you get out of it?

Whether it's altruistic or purely self serving (and anywhere in between), say so - I'm not judging.

I was an assistant instructor in TKD for three years. It was mainly to contribute to the dojang's community and I was never paid. I taught up to the cho-dan-bo students (probationary black belts). It was mainly corrections and pattern routines (we never used the word "kata"). Because I was being groomed as a fighter, curiously, my coach insisted that I don't be involved in the sparring-teaching as it would conflict with my own training. He had his reasons. He was late for a state level fight once and I had to step in as everyone else was either competing or coaching their own student, so that was the rare occasion where I felt like a fight coach. Apparently I forgot to tell my fighter about the inter-club rules of no head kicks (though we weren't penalised, and honestly I had no idea such a rule existed).

Other than that, we also did seminars and activities for community centres, nothing serious, just flying sidekick demos and community outreach stuff. The occasional board breaking too.

It was fun.

 

[Wing Woo Gar]

Exercising is for the gym, the dojo is for learning martial arts!

Oooo…thesaurus boy! Distressingly, I once lost my beloved leather-bound thesaurus. It was truly awful…I couldn’t find the words to express my upset.

Most teaching is done in English with a few Japanese words thrown in for good measure. But when teacher is unable to use terms such as ‘centre of mass’ or perhaps ‘centre of percussion’ or explain kinetic energy/momentum/inertia/action and reaction, or why muscular relaxation aids contraction etc within the dojo then things become more laborious.

In my gym/kwoon/teaching cube,The exercise is learning the martial art. I’ve had lots of folks come in and after being unable to complete the 30 minute warm up tell me that they don’t need to do exercises. I don’t own a thesaurus, well, because I don’t need one. There are many paths to Rome, but one must be able to stand up straight and walk to get there. Terminology and explanation is great, so long as one can apply the concepts without gasping and making a red crinkly face. In many cases the teacher speaks English as a second language, that can obviously present problems for translating complex ideas. No I was ribbing a bit about fatties and such, but I can see it took the jam out of your donut, so I apologize for that. It’s just my opinion that not much martial art is being learned if people don’t have the physical ability to perform the basic motions. Since I teach at my school, I get to make the rules, everyone trains together and does the workout, including me. I call it like a drill instructor and I perform the workout as I call it out. Flailing is allowed at first because I have yet to see someone come in and be able to complete it correctly at first. I just put them in the middle so they can see someone from each direction. I get a lot of quitters, it’s not for everyone. I’m kind to them, but they have to put in the work. No excuses. I don’t teach more than they can do, I never ask them to do things I can’t do. They won’t get rank, or trophies, or patches. They will get honesty, athleticism, and guaranteed improvement in their martial abilities that can transfer to any other endeavor. I charge $7.50 per class to make it available to as many people as possible. I cringe when I see the shape some teachers are in. If I am old and or crippled that’s different but I think teachers have a responsibility to continue working as hard as they did as new students. I was thoroughly inspired to see how flexible, fast, and strong Sifu Woo was in his mid 80s. I as lazy as anyone, but I don’t let that get between me and training.

 

[Kung Fu Wang]

unable to complete the 30 minute warm up

Most new students could not rotate one arm forward and one arm backward at the same time during their first week of training.

 

[Wing Woo Gar]

Most new students could not rotate one arm forward and one arm backward at the same time during their first week of training.

They can’t find their feet for quite a while in most cases.

 

[Wing Woo Gar]

I was as uncoordinated as possible when I began. It just takes time and patience and repetition.

 

[Wing Woo Gar]

My teacher would say “ you don’t need to know why, just do it and then you tell me why”.

 

[Kung Fu Wang]

My teacher would say “ you don’t need to know why, just do it and then you tell me why”.

This is why I like silent video that people just do his thing without talking. If you have something valuable to share, people can see it through your action and not through your talking.

 

[msd89]

Honestly? The kids. Seeing that "aha!" moment when something clicks is amazing. It's not always easy, but the good days make up for the bad. Plus, the pay's decent enough, and it fits my schedule.

 

[HighKick]

What is A red belt?

I don't understand the question. If I typed 'A red belt' in my post, it was a type (I have a lot of them in my posts).

Can you clarify your question.

 

[Gyakuto]

I don't understand the question. If I typed 'A red belt' in my post, it was a type (I have a lot of them in my posts).

Can you clarify your question.

Forgive me for interceding, but I think Old CJ (and I) want some indication of years training/kyu grade/experience required for a ‘red belt’. I assume you weren’t a 10th Dan!

Like I’ve said in the past, stating a belt colour means next to nothing to anyone outside the quoter’s art/school. It’ll give us some context to your story.

 

[Buka]

What is A red belt?

Same as a brown belt in my experience.
(Other than a REALLY high black belt)

 

[Buka]

An unexpected gift from teaching - four of my best friends of thirty years were originally students I taught for a decade before that.

I never intended to be friends with students, sometimes it just happens.

 

[Gyakuto]

Same as a brown belt in my experience.
(Other than a REALLY high black belt)

Ah! Now I understand the post. Thanks Buka san.

 

[Gyakuto]

An unexpected gift from teaching - four of my best friends of thirty years were originally students I taught for a decade before that.

I never intended to be friends with students, sometimes it just happens.

They still paid for the teaching though, didn’t they?

 

[Buka]

They still paid for the teaching though, didn’t they?

Maybe for the first year. Some of them. Maybe.

It was a lower middle class area. A lot of single parent families. I couldn’t turn away anyone who wanted to train just because they couldn’t afford the twenty five bucks a month.

 

[SirKicksAlot]

What motivates you to teach? How does it support your personal goals? What do you get out of it?

I started teaching to help my instructor because it was a requirement for me to obtain my black belt. After that it helped with my personal advancement. I do like to provide physical exercise and situational awareness to children mostly. The hot soccer moms trying to get in shape is just an added bonus.

 

[HighKick]

Forgive me for interceding, but I think Old CJ (and I) want some indication of years training/kyu grade/experience required for a ‘red belt’. I assume you weren’t a 10th Dan!

Like I’ve said in the past, stating a belt colour means next to nothing to anyone outside the quoter’s art/school. It’ll give us some context to your story.

I was a 2nd Gup red belt when took the owner/instructor role. Understand, a lot of things were happening very fast. I got my 1st Dan in 18 months, which I have always felt somewhat bad about since it usually is a 3-year timeframe. It was partly an 'under the circumstances' promotion but I really worked my tail off back then and was more than ready physically and academically. But I did need some seasoning.