Teaching with a Plan

A lot of things have happened for the Roswell Judo Club since August, but first I want everyone who reads this blog to know that the most important thing an instructor can do is teach the fundamentals of whatever it is they are teaching. In my case it is teaching people how to be better people through judo. Over the last several months I’ve learned a lot, especially about making sure there’s a plan in place for every single class.


Tonight I had a plan. It started with warm-ups, moved to ukemi, then on to technical instruction. I expected about six students, but when I walked in only two were there. So much for the plan. I started with the contingency plan of having the two run the mat, forward, shuffling facing in, backward, and shuffling facing out. Then I got creative and ran them through somersaults, backward somersaults, shoulder rolls, somersaults with back, right, and left falls, and even front falls diagonally across the mat. When they did one diagonal event they bear-crawled, frog-hopped, crab-walked, and so on back to their starting place. The best part of the warm-up was that they had fun doing it.

Then we moved on. It’s getting time for promotionals so I wanted to make sure they know their stuff so we started with a diagonal ashi-waza drill I learned from Paul Nogaki. We moved from that into learning how to turn. While turning is a seemingly dynamic exercise, it’s only turning about an axis rather than turning about an axis while moving linearly. Since no judo happens standing in place, we practiced walking down the mat and turning around. As the students were doing this, I had an epiphany! If they could do this walking down the mat, why not have them do O goshi with a partner walking down the mat? They did. And they did it great!

What’s new since August?

Eddy and Ashley are our newest green belts (Rokyu for us). We went to Las Cruces and they tested with the New Mexico State University Judo Club students for them. I must, personally, say that they were absolutely fabulous with their techniques. Most impressive was Ashley’s left-sided from a right-sided grip Tai otoshi (a throw she can’t hardly do “normally” from either grip)! Great big thanks go out to Toby Rue and Oscar Tinajero for holding the event. Thanks also go out to Nadia and Carlos as well!

Rolando fought in his first tournament at the Denver Classic, though not a medalist he did get out there and show he was willing to work. A few weeks later Ashley and Loren IV went to their first tournament (Rolando came down for this as well). Everyone medaled (Bronze, Silver, and Gold) and, most importantly, had a great time! Many thanks to James Lloyd and LC-Grappling.

A couple of updates were posted tot the club website (http://www.roswell-judo.org/). Most helpful are video clips of club members doing almost all of the throws required through Rokyu.