Observations on teaching school children

It’s almost the end of my fourth year of teaching high school kendo and time to reflect on the year that’s past.

A bit of background: I teach kendo in an Australian high school, in two classroom settings: years 7 and 8 (12-14 years old), and after school to a wider range of students. I have already written an article that appeared in the last issue of Kendo World which described in detail the process of establishing a kendo culture in a non-Japanese high school. Building on what I’ve learned in the previous three years, this year I trialled some new approaches.

The main one was to introduce the students to shiai sooner. Each class does kendo for a semester, and previously I judged that this was too short a time to get to doing competition. However I realised that many of the least engaged students were also the most physically gifted in class, and I thought hard about how to include them more, how to get them to connect to kendo.

So this semester I introduced regular shiai, even though many of them didn’t have what I would describe as ‘solid’ kihon. What I found has really forced me to re-evaluate how I evaluate readiness in a student. Almost without fail, the ‘disengaged’ students responded brilliantly to shiai. They couldn’t perform reiho or kirikaeshi properly, but they could achieve recognisable yuko datotsu and in some cases also perform genmyo-na waza such as men-debana-men and men-suriage-men moving fowards. I was astounded to see waza that I can only perform rarely cropping up time and again in that strange, alchemical cauldron known as shiai.

It also helped all students realise the importance of strong kiai (many would just mumble if they were doing kihon drills, but screamed and threw themselves into it when faced with an opponent). They also realised the riai of kendo timing, distance and opportunity in ways that lectures would never get across.

The final surprise was when I acceded to their requests to shinpan some matches. Really I thought there was little chance it would be more than an interesting experience for them. No way could they realistically perceive yuko datotsu, especially at this problematic skill level. But judgements were by-and-large pretty good, about 75% in agreement with what I would have scored. And some shinpan teams were even able to maintain the “triangle” better than most adult yudansha.

One of the interesting things about this classroom kendo approach is that of all the students that start the program (which is about 100 students per year), 100% of them end up wearing full bogu, doing jigeiko and now also, doing shiai. In a normal club or dojo setting, from my own experience at least, only about 30-40% at most would progress to wearing full bogu, and only 10% or less would experience shiai. So there is 100% participation until the end of the semester, when there is 100% attrition! It is appropriate that these students are able to leave the class feeling that they’re experienced a little bit of everything that kendo has to offer. I don’t think I’m selling them a watered-down version of kendo (which is something I’m constantly reflecting on). Those rare souls who then turn up to after school training do start to glimpse the depth behind kendo’s outwardly simple form.

So what’s the learning from this? Well, for me it’s two-fold. Firstly, at certain ages, young people can run before they can walk so to speak, so the traditional timetable of skills acquisition that we’ve inherited sometimes has to be discarded, or at the very least amended. Secondly, if the students ask to do something in kendo I should take more notice of what is behind their request. It may be that they’re asking because, against my better judgement, they’re actually ready. By doing so it is possible to bring the excitement of the kendo journey to students who otherwise might have been turned off by the rigidity of its traditional structure and step-by-step approach.