This week in teaching
Beginner Class:We had around 8 or so students this week. I started them off with ho shin sul (self defense) from wrist grabs. At the white/yellow belt level, we’re more concerned with teaching escapes than we are with teaching joint manipulations. We moved on to basic techniques moving up and down the floor. Finally, we spent the remainder of the class working on poomsae. 4 of the students are still learning the first form (Tae Guk Il Jang), and we had several others working on different poomsae. I primarily worked with one of the students on her 4th form (Tae Guk Sa Jang). Good solid basics class.
Intermediate class:Boy, you can tell when it is summer, because the classes are hit-or-miss for attendance. We had 3 this week. All females, as it turned out — 2 mothers of teenagers, and one aged 11-12. We did a fairly quick warmup, then I let them choose what they wanted to work on. The most senior wanted to work on problem kicks, which we had done the previous week. But it was good work for all 3 of them. We worked back kick, back side kick, and back hook kick. The primary issue with the hook kicks this week was that they weren’t continuing the hip motion through the kick, which was bleeding away most of the power and leaving their kicks short of the target. I was trying a few different drills to help them keep going with that hip. Finally, I worked one that seemed to help.
Normally, a back hook kick is designed to hit a target that is right in front of you. In partner work, the holder will hold the focus paddle nearly head-high straight in front of the person doing the kick. Instead of that, I moved the holder 90 degrees. So the kicker might have a left leading leg, and be kicking with the right leg, the body rotating clockwise so the back faces the target briefly. I moved the target so that the paddle was held on the right side of the kicker — so the kicker has to turn 270 degrees instead of 180. They were leery of the drill to begin with, but they started to get the hang of it. Then I had them do the normal hook kick, which seemed much easier to them at this point, and there seemed to be some improvement there. We’ll see how they continue with their kicks.
Finally, we spent 15 minutes going over poomsae.
One final note — one of the women was accidentally wearing her teenage son’s dobok top (they got mixed up in the wash). During warmups, I had them doing a few variations of pushups. I was doing the pushups with them, and the one woman kept adjusting her uniform. I decided to do my pushups sideways to the class, rather than facing them so that I wouldn’t be looking straight at her. At the end of class I asked her if she was wearing her son’s dobok again (last week they swapped tops right before class). She told me that yes, that was the case, but the story was even more interesting. She forgot to pack a sports bra (she came straight from work), and was actually wearing a strapless bra under her oversized uniform top. She was hoping we weren’t going to spar. Heh. I think she’ll have the right equipment next week.