Note: This is referring to the grading when we were oranges belts. For those of you in our class, yes, I’m a bit behind on writing my blogs, but I believe in doing things in sequential order. So please bear with me on this until I can get caught up again.
Each time before a grading, the instructors start to teach us things that you won’t normally think is important, and making statements like “make sure you get your uniform cleaned before the grading”. For the Orange Belt grading, it was how to correctly tie your gup (belt). When the instructor said this, I literally cringed, and my instant thought was “Nooooo! Don’t show us that! Anything, but how to tie our belts.”
To understand this reaction, you need to understand something about my husband. Everyone in our family recognizes that he is a perfectionist. When we were White Belts, he spent many hours coming up with his own form of tying his belt, and made each of us practice this belt tying technique until we got it right (first mentioned in my “First Month of Karate Class” blog). I had this déjà vu feeling wash over me. The kids and I had new belts since we had never been in karate before. So, after learning the knots from the instructor, the tying itself was pretty simple since the belts molded easily to the new method. My husband had kept his original orange belt that he had in college, and let’s just say that it was uncooperative.
No matter how much he cussed at it, rearranged it this way and that, he couldn’t get his belt tied with this new method with both ends perfectly even in less than 30 minutes. After almost being late to karate class several times, we started tell him to get ready about an hour before class to account for his “belt” time. During this time, it really didn’t help that we were having races to see how many times it took us before our belts were even. Our average was about 2 tries; my husband’s average was… well, much more. When we told him that he didn’t need to be a perfectionist, he would disagree and say that he just wanted it to be correct. My oldest said in a Jeff Foxworthy voice, “You might be a perfectionist, if it takes you 30 minutes or more to tie your karate belt,” and then mumbled under her breath, “or just really, really slow.” However, through persistence and determination, my husband was able to make that orange belt behave and got his tying time down to under a minute.
One day, we were privileged enough to have Master Needham teach our class. Master Needham co-owns the school with Master Landry and is belt #12, meaning he was the 12th person to receive a black belt from Grand Master Cheezic. So, we felt both honored and a bit nervous when he showed up. One of the things that he stressed to us that day was that any monkey could be trained to learn the Tang Soo Do forms, but it takes intelligence to understand how to break them down.
To demonstrate this, he asked us how many moves were in the first count of Kee Cho Hyung Il Bu (Form 1). Most of the guesses were around 3, 4, or 5, and one student thought it was a trick question and said one. If we answered, then he asked us to demonstrate each of the moves to the class. This made us really have to think about it as well as do the movements. Since none of us guessed correctly, he demonstrated that the first count actually has 7 complete moves to it. After that lesson, he expected us to stop monkeying around, and learn the forms like true Homo sapiens should.
This lead to a dozen or more drills on the basic moves that we were taught back in the first month of class, but a much more methodical manner. It was meant to teach us the rhythm of the moves and fluidity. In addition, it taught balance during the kicks, punches, etc. We would start very, very slowly to get all of the parts of the move in, and build up the speed slowly. I have to say that it also helped with building confidence that we were at least learning the basics correctly. I hadn’t really noticed during the class, but at the end of the class, my muscles were literally quivering in my arms and legs due to the intense focus of where you placed all of your limbs. Apparently, it wasn’t just me that noticed that Master Needham’s classes were deceptively difficult. My kids have this mantra now whenever they get a whisper of a rumor that Master Needham might be teaching a class. It goes something like this, “Please don’t let it be Master Needham today, Please don’t let it be Master Needham today, Please don’t let it be Master Needham today, …” You may think that I’m making this up, but I’ve actually caught them muttering this. My husband and I on the other hand enjoy these sessions including the sore muscles that we get the next day.
At the end of class, Master Needham didn’t like the way we did the closing words and clapping. Apparently we were showing too much of our weariness. He said that we needed to shout the words and clap enthusiastically because we deserved it. Ok, I’ll give him that, we did work awfully hard that day.
- Wendy Austin
If you want to see how it all began, you can go to the blogs that I wrote while being a White Belt. I've placed them in the order that I wrote them for ease of reading. To see the original comments posted by users, you'll need to go to the actual blogs.
