I live in a dorm that does a thing called "Firesides" which are programs on a topic that can range from religious intermarriage to swing dancing. The first fireside of the year was announced last week to be a self-defense fireside. I, as a martial artist of five years, am always interested in such a topic and immediately wondered who would be teaching.
Teaching self-defense, and martial arts more generally, is an important thing to me because I train under extremely wonderful instructors. They fully grasp the concepts of what they try to teach and find ways of connecting with their students that makes the material, which can sometimes be a bit foreign, make sense. These instructors of mine are fourth degree and above, which is at least ten years of training, often more. These are qualified instructors; this is the standard I am used to.
At school, that type of quality is harder to come by because clubs are run by people like me who are passionate students who take what their awesome instructors have taught them and then transmit it to peers in the college setting. The clubs, from my experience, are not so great. I stopped going to the Tae Kwon Do club after a quarter because the student leaders did not incorporate a diverse or creative curriculum into the training sessions. There are other clubs for martial arts I am not qualified to judge, but I'm sure to the experienced practitioner, it is a similar experience.
When the fireside was formally introduced and they announced the teachers from one of the clubs (students in a club that isn't Tae Kwon Do, but I'm not going to name it on the internet), I was debating how to react. On the one hand, I could just go, be an anonymous student who picked up on things surprisingly well, or I could own up to my Tae Kwon Do experience and be pre-judged by that. I have strong feelings about the club who was slated to teach the fireside, and my biggest problem with them is that they take a superior attitude about the thing that they practice. I don't really like dealing with them, and I haven't really since freshman year, because they obviously didn't respect me as a martial artist or as a woman.
Then, yesterday, the day before the fireside, the fireside chair sent out an e-mail and a google doc asking us to sign up for the fireside because the club wouldn't teach a class smaller than 20 people. I live in a dorm of 50; attendance of 20 is an unrealistic expectation, and any experience martial artist knows that a class of 20 people who don't know what they're doing is not going to be an effective learning environment. This is when I chose to intervene. After the second plea for sign-ups, I replied to the e-mail and offered to lead the fireside if they cancelled. This was mostly because I didn't want the first event to fail, and I figured there was only a chance I'd have to do it. Anyway, I've taken enough self-defense classes that I could do it, right? So volunteering wasn't a big deal.
Well, today I got the e-mail that they were non-responsive and I would be teaching. I was excited, but then I freaked out. Now, I knew I could do this, it's not a matter of knowing the material, I was mostly nervous because I felt unqualified. I still do feel unqualified to teach based on the awesome way that I've been taught throughout my journey, but that's a different inferiority complex. Knowing my demographic, I planned a curriculum of basic grip escapes (wrist, bear hug, headlock, hair grab) and knew that I wanted to talk a bit about the principles of self-defense and the types of situations that make these women nervous.
Then, as I was writing about my nervousness, my friend came into my room to tell me that the club guys showed up to teach, which totally got me off the hook. I decided to go with the pwnage plan to not reveal my rank and then be miraculously impressive/major hip throw them off their guard. Not gonna lie, I was kind of disappointed that I wasn't going to teach just because I think I know my audience better than these club guys and I have more respect for martial arts than they do. The other problem with club martial arts is that the primary demographic of these clubs is guys who want to beat each other up, which is not all that martial arts training is about.
Well, those guys arrived half an hour early expecting that they were on time, then they deemed twelve participants to be "a handful," and they left after about fifteen minutes, so I was on again. My dorm mates did not respond well to their presence, and so when it was decided once more that I would in fact be teaching, I was just ready to go.
I started by introducing why I was qualified to teach and what my background in self-defense was. I also went over the preventative stuff like staying in groups, in well-lit areas, not to look for trouble, not to be in the situation in the first place. Then I had the group call out some situations that make them nervous in their lives at school. This was stuff like men jumping out of bushes, drunk guys, and aggressors at parties. I started with two basic wrist grab escapes to address the drunk guys at parties thing (which I was expecting to come up and wanted to do anyway), then talked about bear hugs to address men in bushes. I then went over if hair is grabbed, because every participant had long hair, and did a basic escape from a headlock. They wanted to talk about punching and a specific choke, so we did that as well since it came up. All in all, they responded well, felt liked they learned something, and had fun while learning.
It was kind of cool to be instructor for the night, and I'm glad it worked out that way. I'm still a little weirded out by it because I totally still think of myself as a student in this area, so I say that it happened in a kind of "this is strange and I don't think I was the best person but I did it anyway" type of tone. I'm okay with that for now, but maybe in a week it'll be easier to be proud of it. I think that it's just publicly doing something I know how to do, but saying I know how to do it is one of the things that embarrasses me because I know that my instructors/superiors are going to see that I did it, and I always get embarrassed when I do something in front of a person who is an expert in that thing, like speaking Spanish to a Spanish speaker or singing in front of my musical theater friends. My own insecurities; whatever.
Other than this fireside drama, I had four meetings about lighting stuff (DM interview, meetings with two designers for whom I am master electrician, production meeting), music class (I got a conductor's baton, it's really exciting), fellows lunch, and a trip to the gym. It's been a long day, I didn't get enough reading done, and now it's time for sleep so I can function tomorrow.
Today is awesome because of all the cool stuff that went down (detailed above) and I wore my green Halloween owl socks while doing the fireside.
P.S. 200TH POST!!!!!!!!!!
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