Developing Teachers and Tonight's Class

Judo, unlike many other sports, is an educational process. Like other sports, however, it helps its student develop character, motor skills, discipline, and many of the characteristics our society values. The difference between judo, and other martial arts, and sports like soccer, American football, and baseball is the ability to cause great harm through the normal course of the activity if the participants don’t internalize the values of judo.

One of the biggest problems in martial arts is the development of quality instructors. Certainly there are many instructors in the martial arts but the critical criterion is quality. I’m not interested in pointing a negative spotlight on poor teaching; I don’t care a whit about ferreting out bad instructors. I am interested in the best process I can use to develop my students to teachers.

Nationally, the United States Judo Association seems to be making the greatest strides toward developing a national minimum level of coaching ability. Unfortunately, the process has taken an extremely long time but progress is moving smoothly, apparently. The problem with this is that a coach is not a teacher.

Some say that a teacher is more difficult than a coach. Others say that coaching is harder than teaching. I disagree with both. Teaching and coaching are equally difficult, but differently difficult. Some judo players are adept at teaching, others at coaching. The process of developing the teacher and coach must be a process. USJA is doing well with the coaching process, but not far enough in the teaching process.

Again, I’m not here to bash anyone that’s trying to develop a good method for teaching or coaching. I’m just throwing out some observations.

Okay, so what am I doing since no one else is doing things to my satisfaction? (That sounds arrogant, doesn’t it?)

Right now, I have two students that appear to be interested in teaching. Both of them I have help out in the kids’ class or working with lower kyu grades. My classes are loosely structured with simple building blocks and these students that are interested work with the more senior group of students.

For example, today two brand new students came to class. The remaining four youth students worked under the guidance and supervision of my brown belt. While he was not specifically developing the curriculum to be taught to these students, he was tasked with guiding them through their assigned tasks. The tasks were their ukemi, various drills, and nage waza. He did well.

A Brief Catch-up and Something Interesting

It’s been a fair amount of time since last I wrote. Judo at the club has been moving along, but I’ve been busy job hunting. Roswell is a hard town for jobs of the “over qualified.” I’ve got some plans for the blog for the next month or so and should be writing more often.

I’ve been looking at some interesting stuff lately and working on developing some plans. I love research and have been doing a lot lately. I found an interesting looking book on kanji that I’m going to try to pick up (maybe someone will buy it for me for my birthday, which just passed). I found some interesting questions regarding the highest possible ranks in judo. And I am going to talk about my kids’ classes.

First, the book: it’s called “The Key to Kanji” and it’s written by Noriko Kurosawa Williams. It’s not like most kanji books where they essentially define the character so you have to memorize what it looks like and the stroke order. Instead, it’s a break-down of the kanji and it’s evolution to its current appearance. This strikes me as similar to teaching root words, prefixes, and suffixes for all of our Latin and Greek based words in English. (And chords of “Why Can’t the English Teach Their Children How to Speak” from “My Fair Lady” go passing through my head.)

That weblink gives two sample pages (click on the Preview tab) that you can print out to evaluate. Or, if you just want them handed to you…Kanji_301-600_1R 1.pdf and Kanji_301-600_1R 2.pdf.


I’m going to expound upon this pdf in another post, but to give you something to read now: JudoKodokan-Nov1963-20QuestionsRank.pdf. Some of the interesting bits are Questions 6, 10, 12 (this is for AnnMaria and a comment she made at the JudoForum Camp in 2008), 14, 16, 17, 18, and 20.