Pugilism

Ten years ago this month I went to my first kung fu class. I remember it well. It was a Saturday morning, and I was going to go to Sean's class with my dad. He recommended that I wear some comfortable workout clothes, I put on some sweat pants and a thermal top and we took off on our bikes. Along the way we passed my girlfriend of the time (Hi Whitney!) who was doing some sort of activity with her Girl's Science Club. She later mocked me ruthlessly for my dorky "Bicycling Garb." I have never again worn sweat pants to work out. Arriving at the Kung Fu school, we were greeted by Sean and Wendy. I remember feeling so awkward and feeble against these three titans of Kung Fu.

I was instantly hooked. I attended all of the classes I could. I soaked up everything my teachers said. I emulated the moves and techniques of my classmates. I watched Jackie Chan and Jet Li movies over and over. I gave it my all. At the time it never really occurred to me that I was thirteen years old in a school full of people in their thirties and forties, they were like my family.

I was soon allowed to participate in the black sash classes. This rocketed my practice, I was attending four classes a week under the tutelage of three masters. Not to mention that I lived with one of them, trading blows in the kitchen (leading to my mother's only rule: NO KUNG FU IN THE KITCHEN!) and sharing new techniques after dinner. I soaked kung fu up.

I soon had my black belt, a symbol in our school not of absolute mastery, but a sign of a practitioners commitment to the art and the community of the school. It is the beginning, not the end, of training. I wore it proudly for some time, but then gradually wore it less and less. It was important only that I knew I had it, and not so much that others did. It inspired me to train harder.

A few years later I was awarded my third degree black sash, symbolizing that, should I desire, I could begin teaching. In the Fall of 2002 I began teaching kung fu at my high school. It was after school on Tuesdays and Thursdays and I had it set up so that any student could earn PE credits through working with me on an independent study. I had expected perhaps five people to register for the class, a size I thought would be quite good. When I received the class list a week before school began my jaw hit the floor. Thirty people were registered for my silly little kung fu class. The registrar said that more had signed up but all classes were capped at thirty students. I had not expected this. The largest class I had ever taught was probably four people while substituting for Sean. I had never even participated in a martial arts class of that size.

The first day of my kung fu class, the people came streaming in. I had decided that I had to at least halve the class size to fifteen, which was still considerably larger than I felt comfortable with. First I begged and pleaded for volunteers to drop the class, which yielded low results. I then tried to convince them that the weren't XTREME enough by brutally tossing Jesse around a little bit, thinking it might dissuade some people from wanting to participate. This had the opposite effect, garnering oohs and aahs from class. Finally I had to pull the dick move and kick out all the Freshman and Sophomore students, Junior and Senior students having priority in classes. I was able to get it down to fifteen students eventually, which was very difficult to handle.

I learned a lot from this experience, mostly about my art and some valuable lessons about instruction. It is amazing how much you learn something at a deeper level when you begin to teach it, everything that has become automatic and subconscious must be dragged up to the surface and explained in full detail to inquiring minds.

The class only lasted six moths. I would say that only a hand full of people out of the fifteen were actually interested in learning martial arts, the rest just needed the easy PE credits or were there to just hang out with friends. To get anything done this meant I had to be a hard ass with my peers, and even students who were older than me. I didn't enjoy this, and I don't feel it lead to any real learning. It all came to a head when I was forced to ask one of my best friends to not attend any more classes because she was just not taking it seriously. This of course went very badly and I became burnt out in a matter of moments.


Oops, I've gotta go to class, I will finish this later.