Gordon St Gossip

I opened my dojo, Zen Shin Kan, last night. I had four students - Carolynn, her friends Conor and Dylan, and an older guy named George who came up from Kyneton. George will be an occasional student with that drive. I hope Carolynn and her friends continue - all three of them did really well. I don't know if it's just having a younger brain, but they were picking up the fundamentals very well.

Of course there are two types of students - those who pick up the style naturally, with little trouble, and those (like me) who have to work at it and persevere. The thing to realise is that after 10 years these two students are indistinguishable :) so I guess the best trait in a new student is patience.

But yeah, I think it went well. We covered a bit of cutting, a bit of a waza, and some general principals. A lot to build on.

The hall I'm hiring is $15 an hour, and I'm hiring for 2 hours to allow set up and pack up time. I'll charge my students $10 a class, so the mathematically-minded amongst you will be able to work out that I need a minimum of 3 students each class to cover the cost. Based on Reynella, that means 4 or 5 ongoing students would be ideal, since inevitably people miss occasional classes. The hall isn't huge - it fit the 4 people along one wall okay, and if there are more that that I'll line them up on the other wall.. but if it got much larger than that we'd probably have to look at moving.  So I have an ideal class size in mind of 5 - 8 ongoing students - If I got that I'd be very happy :)

I bought some bokken online and they got shipped here in a week, which was great. I might get some more so I can return the plastic bokken to Adelaide on August. I need to buy some wrap to rewrap my two iaito so the students can use them when they're a bit more advanced.

I also signed up to a sword club, which provided me with a license to own the swords. You need this even for a blunt sword, sadly. Lisa, Carolynn mentioned you have some of Adam's swords in a cupboard somewhere - I was thinking you can either join the club (it's $25 a year) or I can put them in the cupboard here until the kids are old enough to join the club themselves. I'll post the club info on facebook.

Of course the best part about getting the dojo kicked off is that I now have an excuse to train once a week.