Tucson Chayon-Ryu is having a yard sale to raise money so that a couple of my students can go to Houston to test for their black belts. We started today, and did pretty well despite it being miserably hot out. I got sunburned on my forearms, which I always forget to protect (you'd think I'd learn), but I wore my hat all day and the rest of me is ( Read more... )

How cute are my students?


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I think I sprained my big toe during sparring tonight.

...I am so awesome.

ow

Went to Target after class tonight because Jimmy wanted to pick up a pair of inexpensive shorts, since it's hot now and I threw out the ones he wore multiple holes into last year, and I needed to replenish our supply of instant icepacks for the dojang after one of my purple belts kneed himself in the forehead twice on Saturday (he's very flexible ( Read more... )

The rank test on Saturday went reasonably well. We had one student meltdown during the test, and one after, but everyone did very well generally. After the test, Master Hwang gave a little speech, and then I gave a littler speech (trying not to cry the whole time), and now I'm officially the head of the Tucson branch of Chayon-Ryu, I guess. Woah ( Read more... )

Did a lot of mat work last night, and tried to encourage my students to push themselves a little harder in it, and really challenge each other to complete the techniques under some safe pressure. And now I am sooooore ( Read more... )

I've been going through old photos to help put together displays for our new dojang (by the way, I've updated the site a bit more, for those who want to see what we're up to), and I found a few pictures that I thought you all might enjoy. First, a nice shot of my eyebrow after my famous board-to-head injury at age 15, taken the day after (which ( Read more... )

We had another Sudden! Move! for the Tucson Chayon Ryu dojang this week. We're now in a shopping center downtown, and it looks like we'll be there for at least a year. On the minus side, the space is itty-bitty, and not ideally structured for training. On the plus side, it's ours, and we can hang things up and make it look nice and all. Plus, ( Read more... )

I just taught my last Saturday class at the YMCA. I took over that class time back when I was a freshman in college, when it was actually on Wednesday evenings. It was my first unsupervised teaching experience, and I started out with just a handful of white belts. Over the years, I built it up into a class covering white through blue belts, used ( Read more... )

My class today was quite good. I didn’t teach anything particularly complex or interesting, and the students weren’t models of attention or proficiency, but everyone was energetic and engaged, and they all left with smiles on their faces. It was a class made up mostly of children, this afternoon, and getting little kids to finish a class happy ( Read more... )