Saturday, February 11, 2006

First Teaching Experience

I taught my first class today!!! Ahhh!! Mr. Coleman is in Virginia for the weekend for a teacher's workshop or something, so he asked me to cover both saturday classes. So I got to the dojang this morning around 9:15, and there was a sign on the door that said "Classes closed due to bad weather". (It was supposed to snow, but it only turned out to be rain). So I unlocked and checked the phone messages just to make sure that it wasn't some mistake. My mom called my cell phone and said that Mr. Coleman had just called her and said to take down the sign and have class. So I did! Gerald was there as an adult, because there has to be someone over 18 present during all classes, but other than that, I was on my own! Only 10 people showed up for all belts, which I was very relieved about. I took my time with warmups (Brian's advice was to stretch warmups out as long as possible the first couple of times you teach, so you would limit your time and not run out of things to do). Then we did some kicking drills to get them sweating. After that, I had them do forms, get a drink of water, then we kicked the bags. I tried to spice it up a little, so after kicking the bags, I had them all get in a line to do flying sidekicks, and we had a contest to see how far everyone could jump. Then I ended with a game of Instructor Says. Whew! It wasn't as nervewracking as I thought it was going to be! I also taught weapons, but I've done that before so it was no big deal. So.... Yay! :D

1 comment:

taekwondomom said...

I haven't visited your blog in a while--I'm sorry! But I wanted to post a comment to you: My church is also methodist--and we're pretty "high" (sung Psalms, formal litanies and responses, rarely a shouted alleluia at our church), but the congregation seems to love liturgical dance. Go figure!

About your post: Glad teaching went well. Switching from student to teacher is hard! Also: I'd like to hear about weapons. I want to learn to use the staff sometime--is it hard?

-taekwondomom/Jane