How can I tell if my child is improving?
How can I tell if my child is improving?
So, how can you tell if your child's improving in class?
It's a pretty common thing parents want to know. How's my kid doing in class? When I get asked this question, I'm reminded of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. They're trying to figure out the meaning of life. They commissioned two of their brightest and best to design and build a stupendous supercomputer to calculate the answer to life, the universe, and everything. Put that question to it and it answers back: the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything is 42. Useless answer.
The quality of your answer a lot of times depends on the quality of the question. If you really want to know how your kid's doing, unless you yourself have a martial arts education, it's going to be hard to tell. And with that I think we should also say, what are your goals? What is an improvement? A lot of people come to martial arts for different reasons. Sometimes they just want a fun activity. Sometimes their kid's getting bullied. Sometimes their kid maybe got ADHD or some other challenges and they're learning how to just regulate themselves. In that case, you're going to have to ask questions.
If it's just a fun activity and you want to see if they're improving, that's pretty easy. You want to ask simple questions like: What is it that my son or daughter is working on right now? What's the one thing that's really challenging them and holding them back? What could I be doing with them at home to help them be better? Those are really great questions. And if you ask most instructors, they'll be excited. That's what I've been waiting for. Because you're helping them to succeed.
If your son or daughter has problems paying attention in class, then you're going to have to have a different rapport with that instructor. And you have to have an instructor who's also going to be a little bit more proactive in terms of paying attention to how that kid's behaving. So then when they're talking to you they're saying things like, they were able to sit still and pay attention today. Or, they weren't doing headstands in the middle of my lesson while I was trying to explain a technique.