Absolute Power, or so I Thought

Absolute power, or so I thought Holy stone school loomed at me, it was at 3.30pm on a dark winter's night, the kids from school were just starting to leave, I waited at the Gate in my car for the caretaker to see me in. 14 kids were booked to somehow learned a martial art, we had eight weeks, one hour sessions, to produce a result. It was a new learning curve for me, normally I don't teach children in fact over the 30 years that I have practised and taught the martial art of Aikido I think that only half a dozen children have been in one of my classes. Phil Turner, the organiser of this course assured me that all involved were so enthusiastic about this project that it was actually oversubscribed and more people wanted to be on this course than they had ever dreamed of anyway we all got changed, the mats that we had, we set out. the children ran around the mats tumbled and fell, rolled, screamed, shouted and went absolutely crazy. Of course I had already prepared all of the lessons for the eight weeks in my mind, but things didn't work out the way I thought it would be, In fact after about five minutes I threw the prep work in to my mental bin!! I knew that I had to make some kind of impact to be able to sustain life and most of all sanity to get through these two months I decided to take the hard approach to be able to control this lot . “It worked my hard looking face” (not really) , and fierce hand clap got them all a lined up in a row. Peace reigned but for how long. Well peace reined about two minutes at the most. It was time To try and create some kind of a game in order to maintain some kind of interest. That seemed to work I found that if I put everything into a sort of game mode, that may be my saviour, but alas it was not, my little trusts were looking for something more .That something more was “Aikido,Aikido,Aikido.” “When do we get to do the Aikido”, one of them spouted, I had earmarked this one as a potential trouble maker, Mhhh !!It’s going to be hard work getting through this hour!!. “Tell you what let's have a competition, let's see who can balance on one leg, but for the next hour !!!”. To be continued :cua: