Tag Archive: teaching Taido

Less Talk; More Rock

Less Talk, More Rock is the name of one of my favorite Propagandhi albums. If you don’t know Propagandhi, they are a fan­tas­tic, polit­i­cal punk band that makes great songs that make great sense. I learned of their exis­tence form Joshua Gargus, a for­mer Tech Taido stu­dent and all-around cool cat. The rea­son I bring this all up is…

How Old Should a Black Belt Be?

taido is ath­letic, and you can only expect per­for­mance of cer­tain move­ments in stu­dents who are rel­a­tively young. i cer­tainly feel that we should con­tinue to encour­age young taidoka to reach the goal of black belt. even­tu­ally, we are going to have to hand them the reigns all together. i know i can’t keep per­form­ing at my level for­ever, so i want to make sure that there is some­one ready to step up and keep cre­at­ing new taido after i’m too old to eat any­thing but oatmeal.

How Do I Learn Taido Theory?

This entry is part 3 of 7 in the series Q&A

Gabriel wrote this: I feel that in recent years there has been a move away from (in US Taido) teach­ing the the­ory and under­ly­ing prin­ci­ples (i.e. why mov­ing a cer­tain way is effec­tive). I’m not say­ing that this reflects poorly on the instruc­tors, who I hap­pen to look up to, but i def­i­nitely feel that the vast major­ity of participants…

More Thoughts on Young Black Belts

Anyone who has read much of this site knows that I have a lot of opin­ions about the belt/ranking sys­tem and some inter­nal con­flicts regard­ing pro­mo­tion to black belt  —  espe­cially at very young ages. This is because I feel that a black belt should under­stand what Taido is about. While I don’t wish to dimin­ish the accom­plish­ments of younger can­di­dates, the…

Are You Good Enough to Teach?

This entry is part 4 of 7 in the series Q&A

Andrew posted about one of the clas­sic sticky issues in the “mar­tial arts indus­try”: Random ques­tion: how impor­tant do you think it is for a teacher to be as good or bet­ter than his/her stu­dents when teach­ing them some­thing? I don’t have any stu­dents per se, but I do try to help peo­ple out when I see them making…