Working with Kids

I had the opportunity to work with a good-sized group of kids (15 or so). I don't have a whole lot of experience when it comes to working with kids, but I know I can be childish, so I didn't figure I'd be terrible at it. I was actually just giving drill ideas to the instructor, Fabian, who relayed them onto the kids. So I had them start off doing rolls, starting from a kneeling position, while holding hands. Kids don't usually have a great fear of the ground, so I figured I could dive right into messier (fun) work--I didn't want to bore them. They seemed to enjoy the rolling, especially rolling backwards. I had them all hold hands to do a big group roll as well, which they actually did really well with. There was only one kid who rolled too late. He kept trying to do everything from a technical standpoint--convinced that he didn't know how to roll very well. I judged the success of the drill by the amount of giggling coming from the rolling mass of kids.

We then practiced some evasion and distance drills, which I figured to be the most boring for them, but I think it's good for developing minds to get just a small taste of the mundane. They started out in pairs, one person striking, and the other evading. From this evasion drill we worked on following the striker, then following and lightly tapping the striker. From here we split the kids into groups of five to work the same concepts but on a mass attack scale. The drill did turn out to be the most boring for them--most of the kids either didn't pay much attention or started horsing around.

Fabian said the final drill should be something fun and involving all of the kids at once. So we created a ring, fifteen feet in diameter, and had Eros stand in the middle. The kids were told to walk quickly towards Eros and hit him twice, walk to the perimeter of the ring, touch one of the bags, walk back to hit him, etc. As they did this, we slowly decreased the diameter of the ring, making the crowd more dense. Pretty soon the perimeter of the circle shrank to about five feet and the kids were getting more rambunctious (I.e. having more fun). I also showed them what relaxation can do by standing in the middle of the crowd while they all pushed on me, then relaxing through the force and having them all fall over. This actually didn't work that well since they just wanted to push me as hard as they could. So after a few unsuccessful attempts (successful for them since they didn't really understand or care what I was trying to demo, they were having too much fun pushing me over), I just relaxed as soon as they started pushing and they all went down. They definitely got a kick out of it, though I think they really just enjoyed pushing me over!

Fabian had them line up again so they could talk about what they learned. A few of the responses were really surprising (unless they were just repeating the overall concepts that they receive in every class--kids past a certain age get that knack for saying what they're taught to say, thanks public schools). Regardless, they seemed to understand some basic principles universal to most martial arts: breathing, going slow to practice and improve movement, footwork, etc.. Working with them was definitely a treat!