Serious or non-serious training?
I can understand everyones different thoughts behind training, I myself have gone threw quite a few. after training for 13 years you start to go threw many stadges of thought. At first it was serious training that I wanted, the instructor was very straightforward and taught us with no laughter but I also have had a very different instructor, he is my favorite.
The instructor who was, at one time, hoping to be a professional comedian.
He is probably the best instructor I have ever had because he makes class interesting while at the same time teaching you the appropaite things and getting them into your head. But, this instructor also can be almost too serious at times, there are some classes that you are afraid to speak because of the topic at hand or the way he is acting but still some days you can't help but snicker everytime he opens his mouth because he makes everything a joke. And if you're in the adult class those jokes can get pretty bad.
Like the time we were practicing for women's assault training, we had two instructors. Mr. Holan and Mr. Hutchins. Mr. Hutchins is a police officer and he was scaring half the older women in the class with the way he was talking about rape and such and such to the point that most of them were to afriad to try the technique. And so Mr. H steps up, this is normally one of his serious topics, and while using me as a dummy just randomly flips me and shows the technique we were trying to teach these women. Then he says this really bad off the wall joke and gets them all to calm down by making them laugh. Once they were calm they were able to learn.
So I guess I am saying, sometimes in martial arts, if you are too serious it is actually harder to train someone. From exsperience I have found that if my instructor just stares me down the whole class, shouts, yells, and does not so much as applaude me in my efforts, I walk out of the class forgetting most of what i've learned, mainly because the whole time I am trying to read my instructors mind and find his approval. It is different with a serious teacher who can also be kind and make you laugh when you are low on confidence. I have had both types and personally I prefer the later of the two.
Still I thank everyone who gave me ideas for my class. It has gotten so boring and mondan lately, I think, after hearing you guys thoughts and the thoughts of Mr. H, that I will inlist his help during class and we will actually start a short escape technique run, about a month and a half of nothing but. This will get the class a little more exciting and then when the escape stuff has been done to death we will move on to advanced combo's those can be fun if you just make them up as you go to get people into sparring, which we will start after that.
