Some karate teaching conundrums....

Last night our karate classes started to get back to normal following the summer holidays. Since numbers drop off quite significantly during the summer, Sensei decided to combine the junior and senior classes together for six weeks. This meant that I didn't do any teaching at all over the summer though I did get to train with the students that I'm normally helping to teach.

So it was with a little bit of trepidation that I returned to the junior class last night to assist with teaching. About twenty students turned up, mainly young children and just a few adults; this is quite a large class for us.

Sensei had clearly planned to keep me very occupied and after a warm up allocated me six young white belts to go through their first kata. They were all reasonably familiar with the kata and I think Sensei is assessing their readiness for their first grading. With that in mind I set about helping them to fine tune some of the moves, particularly the 'look, prep, turn' bits which are often performed a bit sloppily in early kyu grades.

I find it incredibly difficult to watch more than one or two people at a time, especially when I'm trying to examine details so I decided that after we had run through the kata all together a couple of times, I would take them in pairs to watch whilst the other four practiced alone. I was then able to pick up more easily  which ones actually knew the kata independently and which ones were just copying and following the crowd! So although each child (and one adult) got some individual attention from me and hopefully benefited from that; I was also aware that the children who were left to practice alone soon became more interested in talking and playing together, so their time was not spent as productively as it could have been. Would I have been better to have kept them in a single group and just kept going through the kata with them altogether (which would keep them all occupied the whole time but made it more difficult to spot the ones that were 'hiding' behind others) or was it better to do it the way I did?

My next task was to take the red and white belts through a sanbon kumite exercise in pairs using an age uke block. There was an odd number of students so I had the problem of what to do with the 'odd' person. The choices are to partner the student myself, which then makes it difficult to watch what everybody is doing but gives the 'odd' student a good experience; or have one group of three students, which makes life easier for the teacher but not such a good experience for the student! I chose to partner the student myself and tried to watch the others as much as possible. Fortunately the students were familiar with the exercise and I was pleased with how well they did it, however I think if it had been a completely new exercise for them then my choice would have been the wrong one. What do you do when you have an odd number of students for a paired exercise?

My last task was to take the whole class for a sparring exercise. This was basically just getting them in pairs and getting them to practice bouncing correctly on the balls of their feet, switching stance, moving off line a bit, maintaining a guard and keeping the correct distance from their partners. With such a large group it's hard to know who to watch first. I think one of my problems is that I feel that I should try and give everyone some individual attention and that is not always possible with a large group. Sensei suggests leaving the adults to get on with it once they know the task - learning is their responsibility, and to focus my attention on the children. I think this was sensible advice.

Obviously adults must take responsibility for their own learning and be relied upon to practice alone or with a partner but my last question is:- to what extent should children be expected to take responsibility for their own learning, is it reasonable to expect young children (6-9yrs) to practice alone or should their learning be supervised at all times so that they remain occupied?

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