learning how to teach - my first day at the teachers course

[Rogier]

Well last Saturday I had my first day of the Jiu Jitsu teacher A course. The course lasts from September till April 2004 and is given 3 Saturdays in the month from 10:00 till 17:00

For those interested I'll give a short recount of what happened Saturday. (if you want to hear a report after each day I'll start doing that in the Teacher - student part of e-budo)

To get to the course I need to go by train and bus (still haven't got my drivers license) as trains are not that reliable I left half an hour earlier than was necessary. Of course that extra time was quickly used up as the train I took got into some problems along the way.

When I arrived everyone was already seated in the dojo and they were doing some introductions. I sat down and observed the people introducing themselves until it was time for me to introduce myself. I always manage to make myself extremely popular with these kind of things... my introduction:" Hi my name is Rogier, I'm 24 years old so as I just noticed I'm not the youngest in here". At that point I grabbed my glasses and put them on:" but as I can now see, at least I'm the best looking in the class". Which was followed by laughter from everyone..

The group consists of about 37/38 people so they made two smaller groups. We started with the practical part.. learning to teach..
The practical part was 3 hours training (no breaks..). In which we were shown different was to teach at a yellow belt level the techniques kote-gaeshi, kote-mawashi and basic atemi.

Somewhere around 13:00 the training ended and we had a break for 30 minutes.

Next was the theoretical part. There we discussed what we thought jiu jitsu is how we teach students at this moment and what we teach them. Breathing was discussed and other basic stuff you'd expect in a first day of the theory part. We gradually moved on to basic knowledge like movement within our MA using things like irimi, tenkan and kuzushi. A bit later on we discussed things like direct combinations and indirect combinations. We finished off with a quick round of what everyone practised besides jiu jitsu and that was the end of a long long day.

[Mitch Saret]

Roger,

I think a daily report would be a good idea in the teacher's section. Many people who teach martial arts, while good at what they do, fail to cover the basics of HOW to teach. It really is more than "do as I do" and "do as I say." It will be interesting to hear how another country approaches the subject.

[Shitoryu Dude]

Teaching at my dojo is one of those incremental things. Students that show promise are typically asked to help out another student. The higher your rank the more you are asked to help out. If, like myself, you specialize in something, expect to be called on A LOT to instruct the newbies in that. My experience has been that I learn more from teaching than I do just from practice.

As for being certified to teach the art, they require that you be at least sandan rank first. By that time you should have some 10 to 15 years experience.

[Kimpatsu]

Originally posted by Shitoryu Dude
As for being certified to teach the art, they require that you be at least sandan rank first. By that time you should have some 10 to 15 years experience.

Snap.

[Rogier]

busy writing the an update now... will post it in the Teacher - Student forum