Teaching Kids Martial Arts is never an easy task, the attention span just isn’t there, you need an endless supply of drills and games to disguise repetition and you need to educate them in an exciting manner.
I used to love teaching these sessions, but as our numbers dropped some years ago my enthusiasm drained, this was our fault, we stopped advertising, stopped pushing for more students and in doing so became unorganised. Now things couldn’t be more different. Starting small we have a regular class of youngsters who have just gained their first Tags in our Karate Kids program, the tag was for pad drills and throughout the class I was surprised at how eager they were to impress the Black Belts and how each one had taken the drills home with them to practice.
It was a different kind of enthusiasm than you see in normal Adult classes, and for those that don’t want to teach children, or in fact don’t like teaching them, I would beg you to reconsider. I felt a great amount of pride swelling when we dismissed them and the father of one of the sons approached me to say that he thought it was great what we were doing, he wanted to thank me personally.
You often don’t get thanked in your role as Instructor, this sometimes leaves you feeling a little taken for granted, but its part of the job, however its times like this that makes the headaches, late nights, hours ploughed into coaching etc.. all worthwhile.
