Opening my own academy is full of new experiences and this week was no different. For the first time we held kids testing and it was a great experience. I have helped during tests before and I’ve given plenty of tests in physical education, but it’s a totally new territory for me as it pertains to Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.
Constructing the curriculum, designing a test, and then administering a test in front of a classroom full of students and parents almost felt as much a test of my abilities as a teacher as it did a test of their skills as a student.
I must say that I was pleasantly surprised by the level of attentiveness, attention to technique and, of course, the physical performance of the techniques themselves. All of my students not only passed, but passed with flying colors. I really enjoyed the process and I am looking forward to the new content that I get to teach over the next two months.
After the test the students and I posed for a couple of photos. We took the typical serious photos and then Megan called out for a photo of all the kids choking me. I’m not sure how they all got a hand on my collar but one thing is for sure, if you ask one of my kids to choke you they are going to try to choke you OUT!
I did learn one very important detail. My students CAN sit quietly, address adults respectfully, pay attention and perform techniques to a high standard. So evidently I’m doing something correctly.
I’m continuing to push the standards and teaching methods at my school. On Fridays and Saturdays we are going to start taping our grappling time (optional of course). During the week I will review the grappling, find important transitions and technique choices, and then edit it together. The following week we will review the edited videos as a class during the beginning of our advanced class and practice avoiding mistakes or reinforcing positive technique choices. I REALLY think this going to take our training to the next level and I’m looking forward to reporting on how this plays out. Maybe in the future I’ll post one of the videos that I’m talking about if I can get the permission of one of my students.
What this means for me is that I spend about an hour every night editing together techniques whether it be for my YouTube channel or review of rolling in class, but I figure that’s part of what it’s going to take for my students to be great. I need to be a professor on AND off the mat.
My new YouTube channel is doing well. I’ve already got 75 subscribers and it’s only going to grow from there. Currently there are 8 videos, but as I’ve stated before I will upload a technique a day so it’s going to blow up quickly. One thing that I’m going to do that a lot of other channels aren’t doing is include transitions, escapes, positional theories, reversals, sweeps AND submissions. More often than not a lot of the channels focus on submissions or sweeps and that is it. I agree that these things are important but for a sport that preaches position over submission our instructional videos certainly don’t reflect that.
Previously I used to post a video a week in my blog and I plan on continuing to do that. Now I’ll just pick a technique from the week and post that and hopefully that reminds people to check out my channel to see the other four techniques of the week.
I’m really debating putting up live grappling time on the channel because I’m concerned that it might clutter the curriculum videos. Right now they are all named with the position first, then if it is a submission, escape, sweep reversal, etc., then followed by the name of the technique. This will make it very easy for someone going through my videos when there are 200 of them to find the videos from specific positions.
Anyhow, here is this week’s technique, a transition from Mount to Side Control.
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Thanks for reading!
Jeremy
