MAMA: Adventures in Martial Arts and Motherhood

From a conversation overheard at a recent BJJ tournament at City College: Guy 1: I heard he is kind of a jerk to his students. Like he yells at them when they lose and stuff. And he doesn't pay much attention to lower belts during rolling, he mostly just rolls with the other black and brown belts.  Guy 2: But I heard he is a really good teacher.  Guy 1: Oh he is! He is really great at demonstrating technique. Really knows his stuff! I took class there once and it was awesome! Um, guys? If he is a jerk to his students he is not a "really good teacher". He just a jerk who happens to also be pretty decent at teaching jiu jitsu moves. I don't know who they were talking about. But I actually hear this kind of stuff in the martial arts world a lot. Apparently dojos are full of these "amazing" teachers who really "know their stuff". They have won a lot of trophies, these guys. They have important names. You go to their schools, watch them demons

I first started my karate life at a small dojo on 99th street and Broadway. There are a lot of things I remember about that place. Most significantly, how hard it is to climb three flights of stairs on your way to a sparring class that you are deathly afraid of. And the broken parts of drywall where students had "fallen" into the changing rooms. (Read: punched through a wall by a man who will remain nameless. Well ok, his name was Paul. But we had like 7 Pauls in the dojo back then, and all of them will probably think this is about them, because it was, so its fine.)  The other thing I remember about those early years was that the dojo was above a restaurant. It changed multiple times over the course of my training, but when I first joined it was called Bahama Mama. I have no idea what kind of place Bahama Mama was because I was a teenager at the time. After class we went for pizza. But the grownups would sometimes go in there and we youngins assumed all kinds of wildness w