I recently spent a day training with a jodo group in Washington DC with two of my students. Even though we were invited to train for the whole day from whenever we were able to show up (the host teacher arranged for extra afternoon training), I busted my butt (and commanded the busting of my two students' butts) to get there in time for their regular group okeiko, which started at 11:00am. I did it because I wanted my two guys to have an opportunity to see that there is in fact an audience for this practice (the host teacher has about 20 students). And I also felt that it would be nice for them to be able to feel part of that larger whole - a bonding opportunity, if you will.
And it worked out great. We had a good (and exhausting!) day's practice, I got to see a few people I have not seen in awhile, the guys got to meet some fellow enthusiasts, and we all got our butts kicked. Even my ancient car cooperated. It was a pretty good weekend.
However, it did get me thinking about my relative dearth of students. I have about 7-8, spread between two places, and at this time of year, between college terms ending and holidays looming, I am lucky to get 1-2 people at a practice. Sometimes there is no one, and while I love the opportunity to practice by myself, it makes my sponsor unhappy because he does not make any money when that happens. By contrast, about 1/2 of the host teacher's students showed up in DC - about 10 people - with the teacher and the three of us it made for a relative "cast of thousands" as one Facebook commenter put it when he saw the photo.
And, for the record, it is not just me. The sponsor of my Thursday space says all of the classes are suffering from lack of attendance at the moment, so perhaps it's just the time of year, but I think there is another side to the problem.
Here's the story. My great aunt had a small farm in Pennsylvania. There was a white, clapboard house, a barn, and a catfish pond. There were blueberry bushes (beloved by the local Pocono mountains bears), and a spring house. It was beautiful and cool in the summertime, and I used to enjoy visiting when I was going back and forth to NYC in the early years. At one point, my aunt asked my father to look into a problem with the catfish pond. Even though she had many catfish, they never got to be more than about 8 inches long. What, she wondered, could be done to make them grow bigger. My dad, the biologist, responded - fewer catfish. She didn't quite understand. What if she fed them special food? Same result, said my dad. You need fewer fish in the pond. Right now, the fish were the optimal size for the space available in the pond for everyone to have enough food, water and oxygen. Get rid of some of them, and the remaining fish will be larger, because they will take advantage of the relatively increased resources.
Heaven forbid! My aunt could not bear the idea of getting rid of the catfish, so, in spite of special food, they never did get any larger than 8 inches, if that.
My aunt eventually died after a long life and the farm was sold, as I recall, to a couple who kept horses and were delighted with the place (I don't know if they kept the pond or not). End of story.
I thought of this when I was talking to the host teacher this weekend about class size. I could always do more to publicize my classes, of course, but NYC is a lot like a catfish pond. There are so many dojo, and so many teachers (and senior students who sometimes strike off on their own), and so many fitness crazes that come and go, including cardio kickboxing and hell knows what else, that every place can only attract a handful of students, except for special events. I should qualify this by saying that there are a few larger dojo out there for things that are less traditional. Traditional dojo, in my experience, tend to be small anyway, but as people have found out about koryu budo, more dojo have come into existence, and fewer people per dojo are the result. People can pick and choose the location, style and time of classes, so everyone picks what they want.
As part of my evidence, several old students of my teacher, Mr. Otani, have said that originally, when he first started teaching iai, his classes were packed with students, many of whom were teachers of other genres of martial arts. Otani Sensei was the *only* catfish in the pond at the time. But as time went on, people peeled away, whether to incorporate their new techniques into their curriculum, or to do other things, I do not know. But we can do the math easily - if 20 people are interested in swordsmanship, and there is only one dojo, then that one dojo will have 20 students. One senior student goes out on his own, and takes 1/4 of the students, then you have one place with 15 students, and another with 5, and so on. Since traditional budo involves little, if any, competition opportunities and may or may not function as a rank-granting organization, and (importantly) is not really meant for small children, the number of new recruits in a given year is understandably small. As groups form and multiply, the available pool of students becomes ever smaller relative to the number of opportunities to train. Really simple math.
If we step back and look at NYC's cultural scene, you can take classes of every conceivable description in any cultural practice to be found almost anywhere in the world right here, if you look hard enough for it. And the teachers are the best to be found anywhere as well, by and large. It's a wonderful thing, but it also makes sustaining a group a lot like trying to grow big catfish in a very small, overpopulated pond.
No comments:
Post a Comment