Independent Component 1
L
a) I, Rene Lacad, affirm that I completed my independent component which represents about 30 hours of work.
b) One of the instructors at the studio, Chris Crisostomo helped me complete my independent component. He is probably the most important source I have because he constantly helped me teach, and corrected me when I wasn't doing something correctly, as well as gave me tips to teach better.
c) Don't have one.
d) During my independent component, I attempted to focus on training some students to become better than they already were. The students I chose were the ones constantly there, so I could easily show up and find them there ready to be trained. My first plan was to train these students to move up in rank, but due to the rank differentials it would have taken much longer because of the fact that they would each have to learn separately as opposed to a class that contained all of them. I reevaluated my goal to prepare these students for a tournament as well as make them better fighters in general. Initially I set a schedule to train them, and what days to be there. When the schedule was set to either 2 or 3 days a week give or take, and then broken up into 2 hour sessions each. When we started our training the students were already decent naturally, but they was lacking some basics and fundamentals that could easily be improved on. After about 12 weeks of training, many of the students had improved much more than you would imagine, and I was satisfied with my work.
I
Although 12 two hour sessions only adds up to 24 hours of work, this does not account for me planning and creating a lesson plan for the lessons. The day before each lesson, I took about 25-30 minutes to plan what I was going to do the next day, so that the students would never have to repeat the same thing, as well as create variety in what they learned, although many classes did include the basics, no two were ever the same. Many of these students have improved, and I can say that my mentors and peers can vouch for me. In the upcoming tournament on February 23, many of these students will compete, and hopefully obtain a big win for themselves as well as for me.
A
This component increased my understanding of the foundation of my topic better by showing my the difficulties of teaching as well ass showing me the importance of basics. This also showed me the joys of teaching also, an example would be the end result. Although my students were never bad, they never stood out either. A short example would be near the end of training one of my students was in a class fighting and he did a move that none of the instructors had seen him do before. An instructor jokingly yelled "wow, I didn't know that DJ could blitz." (DJ was the student, and a blitz is a sparring technique.) This gave me a sense of pride because of the fact that I could say that I had accomplished something. These little improvements are what karate teachers live for. Another example of how this venture had helped was how it made me better. Before I started this component my basics were also a bit rusty, but through teaching them, I myself improved with my students. An example would be recently when sparring with one of my fellow black belts, I was easing my way to a win, when before this particular person would give me a hard time. Although teaching was not necessarily my main objective, I still became a better fighter, which IS my objective. This experience helped me as a whole teaching me that basics and fundamentals are just as important as complex and intricate techniques.
