Another beginners' course is over

Well done to Zanna, John and Nicholas who completed the course on Tuesday. They have learned a lot during the ten weeks and I hope that they had fun too. I certainly did.

If any of the others who were on the course read this, then please know that you are most welcome to keep coming. I know that some of you had injuries or work commitments that kept you away. Don't feel you can't come along and get back on the horse, as it were.

The course has two aims. One is to introduce aikido generally to people who may have not even seen it before. The other is to get the attendees to learn enough of our syllabus to be able to grade to 6th kyu (white belt). Certainly the three mentioned above managed this with ease.

The difficulty with focusing on a syllabus is that you don't have time show off lots of other aspects of aikido. This is something we will be remedying over the next few weeks before Christmas. No stress about grading; just fun and exciting aikido.

I hope we can keep up the healthy numbers at the Tuesday session till the end of the year. I.E. Don't book your Xmas parties on Tuesday nights.

Teacher or Coach

I often worry that my aikido ability is not good enough for me to be teaching. I don't train often enough for my timing and sensitivity to be good enough that my demonstration of technique is really slick. On the positive side, I do feel that I have a good understanding of aikido principles and a reasonable depth of knowledge of aikido techniques, history, philosophy and so on.

The question is what do people want or need from the person running their classes?

Arguably, a beginner is going to be able to learn something from anyone with more experience than them - assuming that they are not trying to teach them something they don't understand.

But perhaps more hopefully, and what I would like to believe, is that people learning aikido need a good coach more than a good exponent of the art. You see this a lot in sport, the rugby or football coach is not able to perform at the level of the players but their understanding of the game allows them to get the best out of their team. Boxing coaches are similar.

Now that I say that, it occurs to me that you generally only get a good understanding of something when you have, at least at some point in your life, been good at it yourself. Also, you can't beat a great demonstration of aikido to inspire and motivate, if not educate.

Oh well, better get more training in then...