DMAC Taekwon-Do Journal

“Just after Taylor received her blackbelt, her mother shared with me that Taylor had spontaneously written me a letter about her experiences in reaching that goal and how it had changed her. This is an awesome testimonial to the power of martial arts to help shape the lives of people and I thank Taylor from the bottom of my heart for writing it to me and then allowing me to share it with you. Taylor was 12 when she received her blackbelt in June, 2002, and wrote this shortly afterwards. The picture of Taylor was taken by Herb West. Again, thanks.“
— Grandmaster J.E. Donnelly

I started out young doing gymnastics at The Vermont Gymnastic academy. Christopher, my brother was doing Taekwon-Do. He would go to Donnelly’s Martial Arts Center while I went to Gymnastics.

One afternoon I decided to go watch Chris and thought that what he was doing was so cool, and would be so fun! I loved walking in when I went to watch Chris and having Master Donnelly say “Hi Taylor, give me a five” and then I would go sit down on the couch. After a couple years of gymnastics I got sick of it and wanted to try something new.

In 3rd grade I decided that I wanted to join Master Donnelly’s classes with Chris. The first day I began I was so nervous, I couldn’t even decide what to wear to class. I remember being nervous about what to do and say in class with all the other kids that had been there for at least a year. I was scared. I got there and I remember Master Donnelly asking me if I was excited. I responded yes even though I didn’t know if I was excited, or happy, or scared, or nervous, or what. The scariest part for me in the first class in when he yelled, “Line up”. That is when I knew I had finally become a Taekwon-Do-ist! I was so excited to go to school and tell everyone. I got through the first class all in one piece not knowing what to think and than a year later I am the one out on the floor yelling “Line Up” and helping the lower belts accomplish their tasks.

Another thing that will always stick in my memory is at every promotion Master Donnelly would give a speech about how good of a memory I had with the patterns and how I was always listening and doing what he said. I would stand out on the floor during his speech and try not to smile even though inside I felt proud of myself and the reason I was able to do all of those things was because of him. Master Donnelly was the biggest part of my success.

After a couple years later I got my red belt and was so excited to get my black belt that while I was out on the floor practicing my pattern for the promotion I would forget the pattern. I was too busy thinking about the black belt with the gold letters that would say “Taylor Walker”.

Finally it was the night to get my black belt. I was so nervous I could have sweat a pool full. I had recited my three speeches that I was going to give the night before in bed. I was hoping I wouldn’t forget them. I got out onto the floor with Gillette Powell, a very nice lady who had helped me get through these horrible couple of nerve-racking months, and we presented our patterns the best we had ever done before. Everyone clapped and cheered. I was so thrilled!  Next it was time for the speeches. I stood up and all along I was wondering if I was going to be one of those emotional people or if I would feel nothing inside. After I started to say a couple of words my eyes started watering, not because I was nervous but because I was so thankful for everything that Master Donnelly and my parents had given me.

After that night was over I couldn’t have been any more relieved or more thankful, It felt like a miracle.

A couple months ago I stopped doing Taekwon-Do because I was interested in other things, but now I feel that Taekwon-Do is the thing for me and I need to go back because it makes me feel so good about myself and it raises my school grades. Ever since I stopped my grades have gone down (not by much) but enough to make me unsatisfied.

Even if I don’t get around to going back I just want to let you know, Master Donnelly, that you are the person that will stay in my mind forever. I will always think of you when I come to a problem in life. You always had the best quotes about life and how people should be treated. While I wrote this I was looking at my blackbelt on the wall hoping that maybe someday I would have it tied around my waist again doing the thing that I will always remember. I am so thankful for all that you have taught me,and all that l will learn in the future, All it takes is a clueless student, and a totally awesome Master to make the soul of life form. Thank you once again.

Introduction

As part of my preparation for testing for 4^th Dan, I was asked by my instructor, Grandmaster J.E. Donnelly, to write a short paper discussing my history with Taekwon-Do, and what my Taekwon-Do goals were for the future. In doing my research, I found that many people had written similar papers, but not very many had discussed it from the perspec­tive of an older student. Almost invariably, people who write about their Taekwon-Do back­ground start from when they first came to Taekwon-Do class as a 6- or 8-year old. Few start their study while in their twenties, and fewer still in their forties and fifties. And I did all of those things. So let’s go back to the beginning.

 

1960′s

In preparing this paper, I had to sit down and think for a long time about where I first encoun­tered the martial arts. I am 67 now and grew up during the 1950′s and ’60′s at a time when the popular culture reflected in television and movies was centered around cowboys and detectives, and fighting was good old fash­ioned “Hit ‘em with a left hook, then sock ‘em with an uppercut” brawling. Some­times, they’d fight dirty and hit their opponent with a bottle or a chair. But it always involved fists and lots of muscles.

This was something of a problem for me, as I was the proverbial “97-pound weakling” of Charles Atlas fame. I didn’t hit 100 pounds until well into high school. I wasn’t very athletic, and too small and un­coordinated to get involved in team sports. I avoided fights because I knew I would get beaten – everyone else was pretty much larger and heavier than I.

Sometime in the late 1950′s or very early 1960′s I have a very clear memory of some TV detective show – detective shows were very popular then and pretty much dominated the prime-time hours on all the networks – featuring a small and mysterious Asian villain who maimed his victims, no matter how large and muscular, with only his hands and feet. They eventually identified this new fight­ing style as “karate” and went into a long explanation of its origins and power for the benefit of the police lieutenant (and the TV audience). Because there were so few practitioners of this art anywhere in the country, the investigators were able to quickly track down and capture the evil-doer by the end of the hour. I believe that was the first time I heard the term, and saw a new approach to fighting not based on having the biggest set of muscles.

By the mid-60′s, martial arts were still exotic but familiar enough that television and movies were able to use them for “gee-whiz” dramatic effect without having to do a lot of explanation. Bruce Lee became Kato in The Green Hornet TV series, and David Carradine played a Chinese immigrant (!) who was a master of the arcane Chinese art of “Kung Fu”. It was all “karate” to most of America, and there wasn’t any avail­able locally around Boston, where I grew up. (Of course there was, but I didn’t know what the indi­vidual styles were called or where to look for them, and it had been pretty well ingrained in me by that time that I was too underdeveloped and weak to learn any kind of self-defense anyway.) And while there may have been some esoteric fighting style suitable for smaller persons, it seemed to be reserved for Asians because the popular media at that time never showed Westerners who were adept at the style. That didn’t happen until the early 1970s.

By 1968, I was deeply involved with college studies at Boston University. I had bounced around among several majors until I discovered physics, which I found that I loved. I made plans to become a physi­cist and teach at the college level. In 1968, to catch up on lost time, I took a summer physics course at M.I.T. that would allow me to jump ahead a semester toward graduation. By chance I sat next to a Korean student a couple of years younger (and smaller) than I named Won Kim. Over the course of several lectures we traded notes, and helped each other to clarify one topic or another. At the end of one class, as we walked out, he mentioned that he was going to start teaching a free class in Taekwon-Do for M.I.T. students as part of his black belt commitment, and asked if I’d like to join. I said, “What’s Taekwon-Do?” He said, “Why don’t you come and see?”

So I did. I figured I could do it for one class and, at worst, I’d lose an hour or two out of my life. He wound up with about 15 people in his class (it was free, after all!). He began with a short demon­stration of what Taekwon-Do was capable of. I started to recognize some of the same techniques I’d seen on television. I found it amazing that someone so small and not-muscular could move so fast and execute such powerful kicks and punches.

Kim had received his black belt in Korea, and when he came over to go to college he continued his martial art studies at a local Taekwon-Do school run by Master Dong Pil Kim on Huntington Av­enue in Boston, just across the Charles River from M.I.T. in Cambridge. Won Kim ran his summer class in much the same strict Korean manner in which he was taught and that may have been too much for some of the class members, several of whom dropped out. He carried a small switch which he would snap against an errant student’s posterior if they were not paying attention. To toughen up our knuckles he would position us around the concrete col­umns in the M.I.T. gym and have us punch the stone. Some of these techniques caused me to question my commit­ment. Nevertheless, I stayed and did the best I could. At the end of the summer semester, he tested the students remaining – myself among them – with Dong Pil Kim sitting on the board, and we earned our yellow belts.

Summer classes were ending, but he announced that students who wanted to continue could join Master Kim’s school for $15 a month. I really wanted to do this because I’d found that I could learn to perform the various patterns, kicks and punches by working at it. But $15 a month was a huge sum of money for me at the time – the room I was renting in Cambridge, including meals, cost about $35 per month so $15 was money I could ill afford. I let the idea of Taekwon-Do go for the moment, but I had learned that I could do this even if I were small and underdeveloped.

1970′s-80′s

Time passed. By 1969 I had finished college and gone on to graduate school, first at Northeast­ern University in Boston, then at Clarkson University in Potsdam, NY. I got my Master’s degree and finished the course work for the Ph.D. in physics in 1975, when I lost my funding. Having no money saved, I couldn’t finish the dissertation and the degree. With a Master’s degree I was over-educated for most lower level jobs, and without a Ph.D. I couldn’t teach at the college level. I moved that year to Brooklyn, NY and, after a couple of years of low-paying jobs, wound up almost by accident doing computer programming – I had taught myself in graduate school – for several banks and brokerage houses, which I found challenging and satisfying and fairly well-paid. I got married in 1982 and we moved to Bay Ridge in Brooklyn, close to Fort Hamil­ton. As I walked home from the subway each evening, I would pass a Taekwon-Do school on 5^th Avenue at 86^th Street in Brooklyn. It was on the second floor so I couldn’t see in the win­dows, but in warm weather the win­dows would be open and I could hear kiaps and would sometimes see someone kicking.

I started to talk about it to my wife, who had been complaining that we were getting no exer­cise. She wanted us to take up jogging, which I always thought a silly and mindless form of exercise. I suggest­ed that perhaps we should try Taekwon-Do, and at least we’d have the benefit of learning some self-defense techniques. She wasn’t entirely convinced, but she agreed to give it a try. So sometime in late 1982 or early ’83 I signed us up for lessons at Kwang Sung Kim’s School of Taekwon-Do and twice a week we’d trudge up the stairs for classes. I started again as a white belt, and the oldest student in class, pushing forty. Master Kim recognized this and commented, by way of encouragement, that he was only a couple of years older and that he was still able to do Taekwon-Do as well as any younger black belt by exercising regularly, and he suggested a few exercises I might do at home.

It was a fairly small room, perhaps 20′x40′, but Master Kim, then a 7^th degree black belt, had trained some well-known competitors there and elsewhere, such as George Vitale, Nelson Perez and Reuben Lopez. Classes were pretty well-attended (read: crowded) and in the sum­mer, even with the windows open, it could top 90 degrees in the non-air-conditioned room which was directly below the tarred 2^nd floor roof which acted like a radiator working over­time. At breaks, every­one would dash into the hall, where a window was open and there was a garden hose available on the adjoining building’s flat roof, and everyone would douse themselves with the hose to cool off before they passed out (which did happen on occasion).

Kwang Sung Kim had an interesting warm-up method which all students performed. He would start with simple stretching, then jumping jacks or rising kicks (if the room was not too crowded), then push-ups (done on the knuckles on the wooden floor), and finally would have students proceed sequentially through the colored belt and black belt patterns, up to the final pattern presently being learned by the highest belt on the floor. As each student completed the highest pattern they had learned, they would leave the floor and sit cross-legged on the side under the windows and watch the rest of the patterns as they were performed. I found this instructive because 1) it allowed me to observe the next couple of patterns I would be learn­ing, and 2) it af­forded me an opportunity to closely watch some of the tech­niques that were common among the pat­terns, such as blocks and kicks; I could see how they were supposed to be done and this had a kind of self-correcting influence on me (and I assume everyone else).

I attended Master Kim’s school for almost two years, reaching high blue; my wife dropped out somewhat earlier after deciding that Taekwon-Do was too aggressive for her. I continued, but my life began to get very hectic. I went back to school 2 nights a week to get a Master’s degree in Computer Science. I had begun playing with a popular bluegrass band that either rehearsed or played 2-3 nights a week. In addition, I was working a full 40-hour work week in systems development, and was on call 24/7 if one of the systems for which I was responsible went down. My wife began worrying that she never saw me, and that I was working too hard. I didn’t see it that way, since I was enjoying each of the things I was doing, but did start to wish that there was a little more free time to spend at home.

The problem came to a head around late 1984 when I badly broke my big toe in class while working on the large bag practicing a turning kick with the ball of the foot. I was having trouble walking afterwards, and decided I should take some time until my foot healed complete­ly. I finished my Master’s program. My work responsi­bilities started heating up as I became project manager for a new broker stock/bond support appli­cation we were designing to re­place something we had been leasing from a third party. So my new-found free time once again evapo­rated and I never did get back to Kim’s to continue towards black belt. But I took away from it a sense of confidence and the beginnings of understanding how to direct kicks and punches, and an appreciation for patterns.

Starting in the early 80′s, my wife and I started to become disenchanted with living in New York. The difficulties of maintaining a car in New York City (home of alternate-side-of-the-street parking rules and car break-ins), the expense of renting an apartment, the near-impossi­bility of affording our own house, the noise and increasing crime rate – all these things pushed us to look for alternatives outside the city. We began to vacation in New England, with an eye to finding a place where we could afford to buy a house and which would have enough of a job market to make the move feasible. We considered Connecticut, upstate New York, Massachu­setts and New Hampshire – all of these places seemed like possibilities.

Around 1983 or ’84 on a whim we drove to Vermont for vacation, neither of us ever having been there before, and within the matter of a couple of hours decided that this was the place we wanted to move to because, as she observed, “it felt like home”. I agreed. So we began the job of finding a job in Vermont to make the move possible. Not knowing much about Vermont, we assumed there were only a few thousand people and a million cows, so we weren’t sure if there were actually any jobs for computer program­mers (or even any computers, for that matter). We subscribed to several of the local papers so we could scan the want ads.

One parenthetical note: Kim’s Taekwon-Do had a little bulletin board announcing upcoming tourna­ments and so on. I recall an 8½x11” poster announcing a tournament hosted by a small Taek­won-Do school in Winooski, Vermont, and remember thinking to myself, “Well, if we ever do get to move to that area, at least there’ll be someplace to pick up Taekwon-Do again.” That school, after several moves and name changes, eventually became Donnelly’s Martial Arts Center. More about that later.

There were several years of job applications, and occasional plane trips up to Burlington for interviews, but nothing was panning out. However, late in 1987, I was offered a job as a systems analyst/programmer for the Bank of Vermont in Winooski which seemed like a perfect fit for my training and experience. It didn’t pay much – it required that I take a 35% cut in pay – but it was more than any other potential job had offered and we determined that, with my wife’s salary, we could make a go of it. So I accepted, and on January 2, 1988 – the coldest day of the winter so far, with temperatures hovering around 25 below zero – we drove to Underhill, Vermont to our rented house. The movers showed up with our belongings a couple of days later, three guys from Brooklyn who had never been farther north than the Throgs Neck Bridge. They got out of the truck and one of them actually said, “Are you sure you want to do this? I just saw some wild animal in the woods while we were coming up the road. We can just drive this stuff back to Brooklyn if you want.” We elected to stay.

1990′s

A lot happened between 1988 and 1996. I changed jobs a couple of times, we bought a house in Westford, VT, and in 1991 we had a son. I kept thinking about starting Taekwon-Do again, but work and home life kept getting more com­plicated. Our son, a bright and curious kid, was diagnosed with a mild learning dis­ability which caused some attention issues and affected how he would learn in a classroom situation. We were advised to try some things to improve his focus and attention span before he started school.

Around 1996, the town recreation commission released the fall’s sports offerings for Westford resi­dents. Along with soccer and basketball was a new Taekwon-Do class suitable for kids to be offered at the Westford Elementary School taught by Brian Gottschalk, then a first degree black belt. I thought this might be just the thing for my 5-year old son, who was shy and not very athletically in­clined. Because he was shy and a little intimidated by the idea, I agreed to take classes with him. And, for the third time, I started Taekwon-Do as a white belt so we could go through the training together and he would not feel like he was behind me.

The process actually worked. Because there were a number of other kids in class around his age, he never felt intimidated and he got a lot of encouragement from Instructor Gottschalk. Each new thing he learned gave him a better sense of accomplishment. Going through patterns was sometimes a challenge because he would get bored with the repetition, but because we did it together he would stick it out. He enjoyed the breaking since it gave him a sense of power, and it was something that other kids his age couldn’t do.

There was a good deal of shifting of classes from one location to another, as the Taekwon-Do class competed for the same limited space with the more popular basketball and soccer offerings, espe­cially in the winter. After running classes for several years, Master Gottschalk announced that he was giving up the class due to other commitments. That left many of us in a quandary, because we were red belts by then and wanted to at least complete our black belts.

I began searching for other Taekwon-Do schools that were affordable, accessible and offered the kind of instruction that would suit my son’s personality. Some places were too peda­gogically rigid, some were too far away, some I just plain didn’t like the instructors. Brian Gottschalk had recom­mended Donnelly’s Martial Arts Center in South Burlington, where he had studied. After many months of in­vestigation of other schools, this clearly seemed the best choice and we became students there.

2000′s

There was a period of playing catch-up – we had stopped training for nearly a year – but we eventually got through our red belt and black belt commitments. We tested in December, 2002 and received our 1^st degree black belts. This was a longer time than usual to reach black belt because we had started in a class which was filled with very young children and which accordingly progressed slowly, but reach it we did. Look­ing at my son’s achievement, I felt that the process had actually taught him a lot that was unrelated to martial arts – it showed him the importance of logical order and attention to detail, of com­mitment and dedication, and of focusing on a long-term goal. In fact, he seemed to pretty much out­grow – or at least to learn to cope with – his learning disability. I saw some cross-pollination with his academic work; he was starting to acquire interests in things that he wouldn’t encounter in school for a long time and became confident enough in his own abilities that he would buy books and teach himself.

By now I had started to become increasingly aware of my body’s age limitations. I was then in my late 50′s and couldn’t jump as high or kick as high as, or match the stamina of, younger students. I had to start thinking about how to use what skills I did have most efficient­ly in order to adapt Taekwon-Do to my particular abili­ties and weaknesses. This forced me to think about stances, setup and movement. And with age came a more patient approach to learning than I brought to class in my earlier encounters with Taekwon-Do. Previously it was more about reaching the goal (whatever the immediate goal was) than in understanding what was being taught. With the realization that this was likely the last time I’d be able to try this, I took a more patient attitude, concentrating on basics and getting more of an understanding of how the various blocks and attacks could actually be used.

My son and I continued classes, reaching 2^nd degree black belt in 2004. He stopped taking classes in order to spend more time preparing for the college application ordeal, while I continued. I earned 3^rd degree in December, 2007.

The Future

So here I am on the cusp of reaching 4^th Dan. To be honest, when I started this process so long ago, I could not have conceived of going this far, even beyond 1^st Dan. But, if nothing else, Taekwon-Do is a process of gradual improvement without a specific time line. You continue your training, focusing on small tweaks and improvements to techniques you may have learned long ago. It is all about persis­tence and consistency.

I think that’s the part about Taekwon-Do and other martial arts that newcomers don’t get. They come in with unrea­sonable expectations, perhaps nurtured by popular media. They expect major changes in a short time, rather like the next miracle diet that promises that you’ll lose twenty pounds in two weeks. When they don’t see Bruce Lee in the mirror after a couple of months, they just shrug and say, “It was all hype after all.” They are unable to focus on the process and the long-term goal.

Part of me wonders what would have happened if I had managed to find the $15/month that would have permitted me to continue training in 1968. Would I have stayed with it? I think so. I expect I’d be much better than I am now, of course, but life’s full of what-ifs. In retrospect I can see that it would have done a lot for my self-confidence, and perhaps made me better able to focus on my education. It would certainly have kept me more fit and perhaps given me more energy; a sedentary life­style is one of the unfortunate drawbacks to the life of a programmer.

So now I have to think about where I go from here. I’m enjoying the process of honing my skills and acquiring new ones, learning new techniques and breaks that would have been impossible to imagine forty years ago. But I’m also starting to feel some physical limitations – I can’t jump as high, or move as fast, I’m feeling some stiffness in the joints – maybe arthritis, – my knees aren’t in great shape, and I can’t stretch as far as I used to. Chalk it up to age.

That said, I’m certainly in much better shape than most of my peers. When I recently saw some of my high school classmates for the first time in over 40 years, I was surprised and saddened by how fragile they looked – and these were the athletes in high school! Even people younger than I seem to look and walk older than they should. Maybe it’s my good genes, but I think it far more likely that I’ve retained what agility and fitness I have through regular Taekwon-Do training. When I am compelled to miss classes for a week or two due to school vacations or family commitments, I find that I start moving more slowly and stiffly, that I have more aches than I remember. So in order to maintain my fitness level in the future I will have to continue practicing Taekwon-Do.

The prospect of being an advanced belt at my age, and of continuing to advance, is making me think about how to fight efficiently when I can’t kick as high or as fast as my opponents. So, in addi­tion to improving my flexibility I am going to have to work on learning or developing techniques that will be applicable for someone who might have a restricted range of motion.

I’ve discovered that I’ve become a little bit of a “true believer”, an evangelist, a proselytizer about Taekwon-Do, in the religious sense. People find out that I do Taekwon-Do and almost invariably say, “Oh, I could never do that,” and I immediately start reciting the benefits of Taekwon-Do and attempt to convince them to try it. However, most people view martial arts as the domain of a select few, not meant for the average person. They see it only as a competitive, fighting art, and don’t think about – or are unaware of – the other things gained from a study of the martial arts: confidence, grace, balance, self-discipline, general fitness and weight loss, and so on. And that’s probably an artifact of popular culture, where martial arts is seen as a synonym for MMA – televised mixed martial arts, demonstrably a heavily-muscled young person’s game and definitely oriented toward competition in the ring.

My personal belief is that this may be where Taekwon-Do and other established martial arts fall short: As a rule they don’t present themselves as systems of skills accessible to anyone, with benefits that extend beyond mere self-defense. A quick sample of school websites ob­tained through a Google search shows many schools emphasizing either martial arts for kids, or the competitive sport side for young adults. When many schools continue to stress the competi­tive aspects of Taekwon-Do to the exclusion of its other benefits, they are restricting themselves to a very shallow student pool. The owner of one of the schools I talked to, when I was looking to complete my black belt, looked me over and said, “Well, we can certainly give you an exercise plan, help you to tone your muscles, but Taekwon-Do is fighting and I don’t think you should expect to do that.” Now, not all schools have that kind of rigid separation of students, channeling them into the equivalent of “vocational” and “college-prep” tracks, but I do think many schools harbor the dream of training a champion fighter and the attendant reflected glory and may unintentionally discourage older students.

So I think some schools are missing the boat by not touting the gamut of advantages in the study of Taekwon-Do. The older student tends to be more patient, committed and persis­tent, and more likely to stay with the program for the long run, provided they see the benefits they’re looking for – weight loss, conditioning, general fitness, balance, flexibility and so on. For my part, Taekwon-Do has brought me those things along with self-confidence and the knowledge that I can complete whatever I begin.

 

Lately, I’ve become interested in understanding why certain students seem to take to Taekwon-Do, and what changes their parents see in them over the course of time. Almost always, the student is there because the parent is trying to teach them a skill necessary for success — patience, focus, confidence, perhaps even some self-defense skills.

The average young student (5-9 years) enters the school with great enthusiasm and energy, mostly unfocused. The challenge for the teacher is directing that energy during class in a way that keeps students from becoming bored and distracted, while still teaching them some Taekwon-Do fundamentals. Some students take to this more quickly than others. I’ve begun interviewing some parents and students to find out how their initial goals have changed over time, whether their expectations have been met, and what unanticipated side-effects they’ve found.

Ernest Hemingway said that courage is grace under pressure. Martial Arts teach such grace. The formula is simple: Apply small amounts of pressure, teach the students to handle it, and then apply a little more pressure.

Grace N, 8½, has been studying at DMAC for a little over a year. We talked recently with her and her mother, Mary N, to find out how her Taekwon-Do experience has affected her.

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DMAC: How did you first learn about DMAC?

Mary: At her elementary school, DMAC offered an introductory class after school hours, and she came to me and asked if she could do it, and I said, “Sure, why not?” Grace was really happy and excited every day that a class was scheduled. That made me curious about what was happening in classes and stuff. And because she was excited about it then, when the introductory class ended, that led us to come here.

DMAC: When she started, were you looking for anything? Did you have any expectations?

Mary: Yes, I was hoping that it would help build her confidence, and help with coordination.

DMAC: OK. Now, you’ve been here for a little while, Grace. What do you like best about Taekwon-Do?

Grace: Breaking.

DMAC: Breaking! OK. Mary, what do you like about it best for her? What do you notice?

Mary: I like that it’s such a positive experience, so whatever she learns to do, she’s building on it and it makes her feel good and proud about what she can do.

DMAC: So, anything in general that you noticed that you’d like to add?

Mary: Just that her confidence has grown so much that it… I see it not only in Taekwon-Do when she’s kicking stronger or helping younger kids, but also in her schoolwork and how she acts in class and that type of thing.

DMAC: What about the school work? Is she doing better now?

Mary: Well, what I’m hearing is that she’s speaking up in class more, that she’s more confident, that when she does know the answer she speaks right out.

DMAC: That’s a really interesting correlation that you get between students saying “I don’t know” and when they practice a little bit and all of a sudden they’re wildly successful.

Mary: Well, I think she was inspired by going to the tournament and seeing what went on there, and also seeing the red belts get promoted to black belts and the work they were doing and the tests they went through. I think that was kind of inspiring to her. Now she wants to do that, too.

DMAC: The other thing I noticed is that a lot of times, she’ll come right in to class and she’ll go to work on practicing something.

Mary: Well, one thing I know, in everything that she does, she’s very determined to learn things and she really sets her mind to learning it, and she’s very focused on what she’s doing.

DMAC: She picks up on the details, too, because when she was out there doing her pattern by herself, many of the other kids her age will get out there on the floor and they’re pretty much just going through the motions, waving their arms around and moving their feet. But when Grace was out there this morning, she was really focusing on stance, coming down hard into guarding block and L-stance. It really looked good. I was impressed, because there was nobody there watching her except herself, so she was self-directed on making the pattern better. Now, how old are you, Grace?

Grace: Eight and a half, sir.

DMAC: OK, I think that’s pretty cool that an eight year old can go and work on something by herself.

(First posted to tkdunion.org on Oct. 11, 2011)

I met Grandmaster Kim in 1976. He was a 5th degree blackbelt and had just opened his school in Bergenfield, NJ in 1975. Continue reading ‘Grandmaster Suk Jun Kim Teaches Loyalty by Example’