NINJA BUSINESS TACTICS Teaching Child Students in 20<strong>22</strong> By An-Shu Stephen Hayes If you’re teaching the type of curriculum that’s more applicable on the street, how do you translate that to the much younger audience? Well, that is a very awkward question. Where my Dayton/Centerville, Ohio school is located, it’s middle and upper-middle class, and nobody gets in fights! Kids in general don’t get into fights. <strong>Martial</strong> arts are all abstract to them, and yet it’s a very pragmatic self-defense system. How do we approach youth? Sometimes my wife will comment, “Oh gosh, I wish we were teaching Tang Soo Do, it would be easier! ‘This is upper-block, this is the punch.’” But what we’ve done is create exercises where we have to be so careful. With a nine year old, you don’t want to scare them, but you do know more than they do and that they’re going to be driving in a couple of years, and they’re going to be out on their own and could be victimized—they could go away to college, to a party, and get victimized—so we’re really training the way the person thinks. Because when a young woman goes to her first fraternity party, she thinks she’s all grown up. She’s 19, she’s probably not going to get into a fist fight with some guy, but things are going to be offered. For her to be confident enough in herself to know that, “No, this is of more benefit to you than it is to me; no thank you,” is a major thing. So, we can emphasize that kind of thinking. At our school we have a series of four elements— earth, water, fire, and wind—that come from the ninja tradition. Earth is holding your ground. And some people are just naturally that way if they get into a conflict or confrontation. Then there’s water, which is being overwhelmed, so I tactically position myself so that the person comes in and I can’t hold my ground. We say, “If you had to fight a shark in the ocean, would you punch him in the teeth or would you sneak over here and hit him in the gills?” Then there’s fire, which is interrupting, and wind, which is evading. We’re constantly emphasizing to kids, “Hey, you’re little! What if a big kid comes around and pushes you around, or somebody tries to grab you?” We use these principles from age six or seven on. We have a very different program for four, five, and six year olds. There we use a lot of obstacle courses and brightly colored pool noodles so they don’t look threatening, but we use them like swords and kids have to get out of the way as we try to wrap that around their head and they get away. It’s a lot of fun and a lot of giggling, but every now and then we’ll tell them get in line. I’ll be honest, I’m looking for more ways to relate to kids with what we have. It’s so pragmatic and yet kids don’t see violence in the school; where they do run into violence is keyboard stuff—cyber bullying is a big deal. A little kid is forming their identity and they’re cheerfully reaching out to their friends and getting that kind of feedback and Mom tells them she loves them; well, that’s just Mom. Dad says he’s proud of you, Oh, that’s just Dad. I want positive feedback from my friends at school, and then it goes haywire. We teach them the technique, but secretly, the technique transmits a state of mind. We have to teach these kids who they are, the value they provide, the gift they are, so that when they come up against this inevitable onslaught, they can believe in themselves, that they have a value, and we have to teach them some tricks and ways of dealing with that. I call them “tricks,” but you could call them “techniques” or “methods.” They’ll think, “I learned this at the martial arts school! I did this, it got the response from the person that my teacher told me they would!” They’ll be so stunned they’ll laugh and try to call you a name, but that means you got under their skin. You won! We need to work on developing some of those aspects as we go into the future. AN-SHU STEPHEN HAYES has authored more than 20 books, worked as a body guard for the Dali Lama, supervised over 30 school locations worldwide, and was named “A legend; one of the 10 most influential living martial artists in the world” by Black Belt <strong>Magazine</strong> 62 MARTIAL ARTS WORLD NEWS VOLUME <strong>22</strong> | ISSUE 1
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