Teaching Pedagogy Part 1 I was teaching the children's ne-waza class last night, and I began to think, as often happens at times like this, on HOW we teach certain techniques in Judo. The club I belong to is far from being a "traditional" club with regards to teaching pedagogy, buy I still think we are often stuck in a bit of a rut. We ignore developments in teaching methodology from currently successful competitors and our sister arts of wrestling and BJJ in favor of methods that are antiquated and awkward. To give an example of this, our CI is still referring to techniques such as half-guard as "leg entangling escapes". This is not incorrect, just sub-optimal. Another example would be the fact that the idea of "sweeps from the guard/half-guard", are not being incorporated as useful terminology to our teaching pedagogy. Perhaps these are not necessary to teaching good techniques, I mean we still show pulling closed gua...
On integrity in the martial arts The short version: Doesn't exist and never has. Integrity is a quality some individuals may have, but as an institution the MA have less of it than most businesses as we are self regulating and have no real standards to meet except our own. The long version, is a bit more nuanced. There are certain systems that encourage integrity more than others. One of the reasons for this is having a sort of built in heuristic check in the form of alive training methods. I won't write much on alive training as that has already been done by this guy . See, in order to have integrity in your MA training, you must have that aliveness as part of the training. Now, why does this matter to integrity in MA as a whole? Well, if you won't pursue, or if your instructor does not encourage, integrity in training, the activity that you are most passionate about and the one thing that brings you TO the MA, th...