My Karate Kid

This weekend my six year old grandson was visiting and I asked him to show me what he was learning in his Saturday Karate class. He waved away the idea of showing me the warm up exercises, went into what I would call a bow stance, and threw some straight forward punches, stepping with each. He then showed me a forehead block and a middle block and a couple of kicks. I have to say I was impressed. He can’t have had much more than two or three lessons and his form, at least to my eyes, looked pretty darn good. Of course he’s a boy genius, but, I thought, he must have a good teacher. He’d tried a Tae Kwan Do class last year and had not had a good experience. In the past I’ve had some doubts about the advisability of young kids learning martial arts. OK, it gives them self-confidence and teaches them discipline and good sportsmanship, and blah, blah, blah. But.

Kids get a steady diet of fighting in movies, TV, comics and video games. Now, the movie, “Kung Fu Panda” is one of my favorites. But I’ve been waiting for one called “Tai Chi Panda” to come out. My grandson has watched me doing the Yang form and from an early age he tried following me. Other grandkids that live across the country have shown us their Tai Chi and Yoga practices during visits. It all makes a great deal of sense when you compare it to my generation’s youth and our schooling in the arts of “gladiator sports” like football, baseball, hockey, and so forth. Exercise is always a good thing. Raising your physical skill levels is always a good thing. But pitting young people against each other in combat and competition only builds insecurity, anger and aggression. Think I’ll get email on this one?

The key to it, it seems to me, is the good teacher. If you’ve seen the classic first version of “The Karate Kid“, you remember the “bad guy” karate teacher that fostered aggression in his students. Of course, in real life, there aren’t any karate teachers that do that. Are there? But it seems there has always been an undercurrent of nastiness in the popular culture (I.e., USA culture) view of the martial arts. Ever since Bruce Lee was Kato in the Green Hornet, the romantic idea of kicking the crap out of somebody in a mysterious Eastern way has appealed to young people. If you were five or six or ten or twelve, which would you rather do, move slowly and gracefully in the park with a bunch of old people or punch and kick and jump and yell, “HEY-YAH”?

To sort of change the subject, I’ve noticed a lot of people getting certified to teach Tai Chi lately and a number of schools offering teaching classes. Do I think that this will  eventually lead to high school curriculums in Tai Chi or ESPN coverage of Push Hands competitions? I do not. It could lead to quite a number of not so great teachers who perpetuate not so good form. But that’s the glass half empty speaking. The more the merrier, I say.

Although I’ve been studying Tai Chi for nine or ten years now and I don’t feel confident enough to teach a whole class. In the classes I’ve taken in the past we often would pair off and the more advanced students would work with the newer ones. This forced you to think about your form: having to explain it to someone else and look for things that needed correction made you aware of your own short comings.

This weekend is another W. C. C. Chen workshop, this time in Madison, Wisconsin. I‘ve been working on my own now for maybe a year and I‘ve learned to look at my self critically so as not to get sloppy. However, I think I need a dose of humility and an expert hand at correction. I‘ll attend the Sword Form, Short Form and Applications sessions. As I've said before, the key to it is having a good teacher..