Kenpo Karate: Kata 2: Iron Fan : What this has to do with math?

Yesterday I managed to go through the entire Kata 2 form three times independently. Slowly, with support, I have learned each part of this kata. This being the third kata I have learned, I found myself FINALLY understanding not only the patterns within them, but also some hidden reasons for learning them, such as increased balance, endurance and mental concentration.

This a.m. class we adults did "line attacks". We line up and "attack" one person in a systematic way following one of the forms (either 49 cross swords or one of the katas). I was nudged by the group to test out my nascent knowledge of kata 2. With the instructor's and group's support, I managed to defend myself against the attacks.

The point is that I am learning this kata about half way through my journey towards black belt and only now am I starting to understand the nature of the patterns we study. I have dedicated several years to this sport/art and only now have I figured out that I really DO need to practice incessantly on my own.

With Kata 2 I have embarked on a different approach in my learning style. With the instructor's support, the kata has been broken down to its components of attack, such as grabs, punches, knifes and clubs. I can visualize what is coming towards me at each stage and have started to see the patterns I need to rebuff the attack. At the same time, I have been watching a video of this over and over so that I have a mental image (sort of like a goal) to focus on. Finally, I have decided that I am better off not worrying about the details of the kata (hand position, exact foot position etc) in favor of a general sense of positioning and defense.

This approach seems to be working for me.

As a math teacher, I have been considering ways I can take this approach and help students adopt it as their own. I believe I am finding a healthy balance between the specific details and the more generalized view of purpose in my karate practice. Now I look forward to translating this into classroom practices of effective learning.

What I learned from karate this weekend....

What I learned from karate this weekend....

This Saturday I went to two karate classes: the early morning practice and the early afternoon stripe workshop. I won two stripes in the afternoon workshop. This is what I learned.

1. I learned that I am getting better at my self defense moves. My yellow stripe is basic punching self defense. My orange strip is four point SPARRING defense. Sparring is ABSOLUTELY my weakest skill in karate, so I find some solace in learning how to make some of the defense more automatic.

But what I really learned is that a student can come in all ages, and a teacher too. My instructor for the two belt stripes is a sophmore at High School. He has incredibly smooth and crisp karate moves, and more importantly, he is remarkable patient. I was in a group with three little children, one of them my own son, and I think the instructor found my presence a little intimidating at first. I noticed he was focussing quite a bit more on the little ones and kept giving me an easy off, even when my own moves were clumsy or undisciplined.

Several things distinguished me from the little learners:

1. I was more inclined to ask questions;

2. I learned the patterns quicker as they were explained orally;

3. I was there entirely on my own free will (my parents, while supportive, don't drive me to karate class anymore)

That being said, I was not necessarily the learner with the easiest time. I tired more quickly that the little learners did. I confused several different steps at times because my insistence of moving forward and my confidence. My overall stance was weak: I find horse stance a tiresome part of the whole karate learning and my knees rebel.

Over the hour long class, my instructor relaxed a little more and was starting to hold me accountable for what I could improve in. At the end of class, while he was putting on my two stripes, I let him know how much I appreciated his patience and clarity of instruction. I felt I had truly learned something to move me forward in karate and I wanted him to know this fact.

Is there anything in this story that resonates for you?

Why karate seems to matter to this teacher....

Karate seems to matter more to me with each passing belt.

What started out as a funny, little activity I thought I could do with my son has encroached on most aspects of my current life.

As I stated earlier, I finally passed my green belt, but it was not until this evening that I actually received it in front of my karate student peers. And that mattered to me more than I had realized.

I have reconnected with what it means to be a learner. In fact, I have finally learned what it means to be a struggling learner, something I never really experienced in the academic or professional worlds I have inhabited.

Whenever I have to connect a right hand move with a left foot slide, I am reminded that when the professor say "Just focus, Glenn, focus", I get frustrated and deflated. Sometimes I get angry. Other times I partially give up and opt to practice some other karate move that perhaps I feel I know better. I respond "Yes, sir" and hope that he'll move on to another student, which he usually does, to my relief.

But what has distinguished me from the other beginners of the class who no longer come is that I persist. Sometimes I scratch together a little extra money and buy a private lesson to help me get over the hump. I find that I practice the tougher moves either in my head or in abbreviated fashion whenever I am walking down the San Francisco sidewalks. I try to figure out the one little pattern here or there that will help me remember or create some semblance of physical memory of the move. Mostly, I close my eyes and try imagine what the move actually looks like.

I imagine myself a strong and able karate artist. My elbows sharp, my movements crisp, my turns purposeful, my opponent: nervous. I am the black belt waiting to burst forth and I am ready!

I seem to have great capacity to imagine and reimagine what I should look like when doing karate. Only a little of this imagination is based on reality.

Nevertheless, karate seems to matter to me a lot more as I move up the belts.

I am not yet, nor maybe never will be, the graceful and strong karate artist I imagined myself to me this evening. One look at the mirror tells me that.

And yet, I am continually able to imagine that I am. That, I suspect, is the core reason why some people do so much better than others in school, in karate and, dare I say, in life.

I am GREEN!

Today I finally passed by belt test. I am officially a green belt.

Why care, you ask?

This belt has been a tough one for me. In my karate school, you can only pass onto the next belt after you demonstrate reasonable mastery of all the previous belt skills. This means you have to not only learn the current belt skills, but remember through practice all the previous ones.

This journey continually reminds me of learning math. As an algebra teacher, I know that all the arithmetic skills and concepts come together to form the generalize math patterns we commonly call Algebra. Some students go along studying math like isolated topics, or, perhaps, their teachers have failed to transmit the idea that many math topics grow out of previous ones. You can't as effectively study addition of unlike fractions, for example, without a strong background in multiplication and division of whole numbers. Likewise, many core ideas of a classic algebra course, such as the meaning of slope or factoring of quadratic expressions, become difficult if not impossible without a reasonably strong foundation in arithmetic with fractions.

So in some sense, I relate my struggles with my GREEN belt with struggles I see my students have with ALGEBRA. There are certain core movements in karate that started at the lowest belt and have been incorporated in increasingly more complex fashions in later belts. Some of those foundations I learned superficially and have deepened my understanding through practice. Others I have avoided because I found them difficult or tedious in the lower belt. This avoidance, though, has come back to bite me when I need to draw on those skills in later belts.

So, while I am happy to have finally passed the belt test, I know I am only part way along my long karate journey. As my karate professor always says: it is not the destination, but rather the journey that counts. If I have learned anything this time around, I hope it is to do my homework, practice all my belt levels constantly, and never avoid something simply because it is more difficult than other things.

I will be good...

Tonight was the last night of review of belt stripes in my karate class.

I missed a little more than three weeks of class this summer due to being out of town. I did not practice nearly enough on my own, hence, I have not quite "mastered" my belt. My 9 year old son, on the other hand, came back from the same vacations as me and rather easily passed onto green belt. I am still purple, but trying.

This week I have been putting a little more practice into my belt routines with the hope that I might be able to complete the test and move into my green belt curriculum. But this evening, I overheard the professor talking with his assistants about who was left to test, naming 4 other students. One of the assistants mentioned my name and I heard the professor say "oh, but he is in his own place".

I wonder what he meant by that. In fact, I have not been to class as consistently as others and also, it is very true that I struggle more with some of the karate moves than others. On the other hand, I have been proactive in trying to catch up and was somewhat eager to show them that I indeed know the purple belt curriculum.

Luckily for me, I am a confident, adult learner without many stakes in whether I "pass" or not into the other belt on some predetermined time line. I continue to love my class, love the art, and love the instructors, to the point, in fact, that I sometimes feel I let them down.

I never did ask the professor what he meant by his statement. Perhaps I should take it literally: I am a little behind in terms of class attendance. Or perhaps I should take it that I am not always the best learner I can be in this class.

I ponder this as I start my new year teaching my 7th and 8th graders.

Math Lessons learned from Karate....

Math lesson from Karate: 

Your kata (core routines) needs to be strong and well practiced.

Twitterversifying

@pepepachaMath lesson learned from Karate: 

Create a positive mindset and everything is possible.

Teacher Diary: Just Focus!!!

Another karate lesson, another thought about teaching.

So, to begin with, I love my karate school and its instructors. It has brought a sense of purpose to my out of school life as well as a wonderful shared experience with my 8 year old son. I appreciate the measured progress I have made in learning Kempo Karate. But I remain an absolutely terrible sparring student.

Unfortunately, this is what we do on Wednesday class.

Last Wednesday, I came into class determined to not flinch away when a punch came towards my face. I spent the pm. in positive reinforcement mode. I practiced in my mind what combo punches I would need to make to prevent punches coming at me. On my lunch break I stepped out of school to practice a few of the moves associated with my purple belt. I considered how they would strengthen my sparring stance.

In sum, I spent considerable time, energy and thought on improving my sparring performance.

Class always begins with some physical exercises for fitness. I get tired, but actually compared to others in the class, I do pretty well.

Then we spar. This evening we did some sparring drills. In one drill, I had to spar my way past a guy and touch the box bag, unless he managed to hit me on the head. I did this drill 8 times and managed to get by the guy one of the times. This felt like a modicum of success.

Then we partnered up to spar. This time around my partner was a guy I have great respect for because he spends much of the time coaching me on specific steps, strategies and combos that improve my performance. I had the feeling that I was going to learn how to improve rather than simply get through the class on survival mode.

After some time, we switch partners and I was up against a far superior guy. I was hit a couple times in the head and began to flinch again when punches came my way. I told myself through gritted teeth not to flinch, but to little avail. The karate professor walked by and in a friendly, but insistent tone, told me that I needed to FOCUS. My dilemma is that I have no more strategies for increasing my focus. I wanted to say that to my professor, but the punches kept coming towards me and it felt inappropriate for me to stop and discuss this issue of focus. And in any event, it does not seem that I lack focus as much as I have been conditioned for so many years to avoid punches to my face that at 46 years old, I seemingly have little control of this.

Again, I love my karate school and its instructors. I am convinced they are working their utmost to make me the best karate student I can possibly be at this point in my life. But I have to take issue with the suggestion that I "just need to focus". It is not helping me.

So the take away lesson for me as a teacher is to be careful when prescribing "focus" as the way to resolve student learning dilemmas. Even students with proven difficulties with focus likely get little recognition for their attempts, like mine, to improve their work every week. The trick is recognizing genuine efforts to improve.

Math Lessons learned from Karate....

In my Twitter world, I am @pepepacha. My focus in the Twitterverse tends to be professional (i.e. education) unless certain political or social topics bite me (like Prop 8 banning same sex marriage). One string of messages I send out to my Tweeple deal with lessons I have learned in my Karate School that apply to my job as a Middle School Math Teacher. There have been many, but tonight I am thinking of the role that self esteem and perceived confidence your instructor has in your ability to improve.

I have been studying karate for 1.5 years and have been moving through the belts at the expected pace (just behind my son). Mondays are devoted to learning Kata (which are the all the routines) and Wednesday to sparring (application of Kata, at least in theory).

I am horrible at sparring.

At first I did not even want to try it. I am not learning Karate as a self defense art. I have never been in a fight in my entire life. 

But there was increasing pressure for me to take up sparring and stay with the rest of the class. The first month I was allowed to be horrible, to shy away from punches and show fear, because I was new. Somewhere down the line, it became a running joke to see me sparring and in fact, that was ok with me as I was not terribly invested in learning greater skills.

But as I progress in my belts, it has seemed to me that I should also be improving in sparring. I have felt increasing tension from within as I reflexively shy away from the punches instead of blocking them or step backwards in retreat rather than forward in attack. A few memorable punches have left me injured after a class and limping around for several days afterwards.

Recently, I have started to come to class with a single focus. Today I will not turn away. Today I will do a double punch instead of retreat. Today I will try to kick a little more. The problem is that this single mindedness does not help a whole lot in sparring as my opponents possess so many more skills that I that when I focus on one, they use another and wipe me out.

About three weeks ago I noticed that the Karate Professor had perhaps given up on me. He used to tell me to focus, to watch for the left punch, or to celebrate the little things that I did right. He stopped doing so and instead just kind of laughed it off. 

To be honest, it is comical, but as of late, I am not feeling the laughter to be helpful.

I tell myself that at 46 years old, I don't have to worry what others think or why I choose to do the activities that I do. I took up karate at a later age. I have proven myself capable of keeping up with the basic curriculum. I enjoy the Kata and the challenge of learning the new routines. I enjoy my classmates as well.

But I hate sparring and try as I may, I don't manage to apply the Monday lessons to the Wednesday practice.

And the fact that the Karate Professor may be seeing me as a lost case does bother me still after all these years.

The thought in my head is a combination of congratulating myself for persevering while at the same time questioning my ability to improve even in small increments in the sparring arena. Most of all, I am trying to tease out why I feel I need some modicum of teacher confidence in my ability to move forward.

So the lesson I am pondering this evening is who of my students in my 7th and 8th grade math classes feel the same about themselves in my class as I do on Wednesday Karate class. More importantly, what can I do to celebrate the little successes they have.