Bright and early I awoke on Saturday January 28. It was the day that Kyoshi Kovar was coming to Arizona to give a seminar about teaching martial arts and in particular teaching effectivly. Kyoshi Kovar opened his first school in 1978, and he combined the teaching of self-defense and life skills to empower people with the martial arts*. The seminar was to be held at the South Gilbert location of DePalma's Team USA Martial arts, and schools around the country were coming to attend. The seminar started at 9 o'clock, so I arrived around 8:30 am. By the time the seminar had started about 30 people had arrived from around the southwest (and one from canada), to learn from Kyoshi Kovar. Kyoshi Kovar throughout the seminar explained how the best way to teach martial arts, interact with students and parents and all in all just run a great martial arts school. He explained the teaching skills required to best bequeath our martial arts heritage to new generations. His teaching philosophy will be the basis for the ranking system of teaching self-defense. His 16 teaching tools are going to be the guidelines for rating each style and system I encounter. Although to the non-martial arts instructor these tools may seem superficial, or even useless, the experienced instructors realize how important these tools are, especially when teaching younger students. 1- Friendliness 2- Transformational Communication 3- Focus Anchors 4-Preframing 5- 3 x 3 rule 6- public praise, private reprimand 7- 3 d's 8- Praise challenge praise 9- influence over authority 10- SSL rule 11-Disguise repitition 12- zero downtime 13- rise to challenging students 14-every huddle discussion a masterpiece 15- safety first 16-never compromise the instructor student relationship. This seminar really helped me define a previously nebulous concept, effectiveness at teaching. But, now i am ready to push on.
* if you would like to learn more about Kyoshi Kovar and his schools, Kovar's Satori Academy of Martial Arts, then check out his website - http://www.kovars.com/
Statement of Purpose
This project is an investigation of 5 Martial Arts styles. Self-defense is a major theme in martial arts today and to better understand how different martial arts schools and styles treat self-defense I am going to learn all I can (given time restraints) about each of the five styles. These schools will be chosen from a list of local martial arts studios, and the style will be the one that is taught at that studio. Many studios teach multiple styles, so in this case on of the styles taught there will be analyzed. At the end of the project all the schools I visited will be rated and scored to show in which areas they excel or by contrast, fall short.
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