aikido class

I taught the aikido class yesterday, as planned. I had my usual nervousness around teaching, plus I was doing it in Spanish, which is...harder. I got good feedback from people though: everyone at their different levels felt it was useful, and appreciated the step-by-step clarity, which Jorge doesn't usually do.

One thing that's nice when teaching is to have some experienced students who you know well enough to predict how they'll respond when you throw them. I had one guy who I knew would respond smoothly, Blas, and then a visiting black belt from the other aikido group that uses that space. In order to do a convincing demonstration, though, I brought up Rafael, who's only been training for a month or two, but he teaches Shotokan Karate and he's built like a truck. He's easily got 70 pounds on me, and he's really, really, really strong (he showed me a photo of him destroying a 5-high stack of bricks at a demonstration last week).

I sometimes feel like the class watches Jorge, who's my height but obviously much more muscular, and they have trouble imagining how they can do what he does; and they know me, and I'm pretty strong even though I'm lightly built, and I see a lot of frustration. I wanted to remind them that there are people far stronger than me, and I can still do aikido techniques on them.

I did chuckle when Rafael grabbed my arm, and I said, "Well, let's see if I can do it." It was actually better than planned, because he was really trying, so by the time he fell down a few times, he was pretty tired.

I'm glad I get another class on Tuesday, to work on some different stuff.