New Guy Dave

Our text feed was filled with people saying they couldn't make one or both of the classes last night.  Although that's a bummer generally speaking, it means that the class was going to be small or a private lesson.  I used to be frustrated by that, but now I'm definitely down with the attention to detail it provides and the longer periods of time we can spend on single parts of exercises.  

The black belt extra class, which meets at Sensei's house between the general class and the adult class requires a drive to the South which can take anywhere between fifteen to 40 minutes depending on traffic.  For whatever reason I got all green lights and ended up second.  Very unusual for me.  The class ended up being Mya, Mark, Sensei and me.  Perfect class.

We went through as much of the test as we could in forty-five minutes.  By the end we had made it through seven kata and their bunkai.  Not bad, but the slow up was due to Sensei's attention to detail on the bunkai.  It mean lots of restarts and conversation.

I finally got to meet our latest addition to the adult class, Dave.  A silver-haired guy that reminds me of the consummate ex-Californian.  You can practically visualize this guy surfing.  I found out later that he was a student of John Sells who our Sensei studied under from time to time.  Dave lives almost an hour away so he appears to be very invested in the class time.

Because Dave has been out of practice, Reed is taking some extra time to go over the basics.  In my experience this can be trying because the basics are something we do with the kids and can be boring even if you are focusing on your stances and getting things correct.  However, since Dave has been around since back in the day, the basics took on several layers of complexity.  Simple drills became very complex as step and step were added.

We finished the class with a little kata.  I was able to teach Haku Cho to Sarah for a bit which was nice, but we ended up having a discussion about teaching method.  I've definitely got a learning curve there.