Hi My Name is Mike Iannone. I am the owner of Dragon Gate Martial Arts Academy and the chief instructor. I am also a father of a soon to be 6 year old boy and an 8 month old Baby Girl. Today I want to talk about focus. I have been teaching Martial arts since 1992 and owned my school here in Oakdale, NY now for almost 18 years. I hope what I’m going to share today will be helpful to parents. I am not trying to upset anyone but want to shed some light on what I have learned over the last 25 years teaching and also over the last 6 years being a dad. I would also like to share that over the years I have worked with many children on the Autism Spectrum and with Adhd and Add.
Now, this is where you might say wait a minute what are you talking about. Here we go, I do not believe children have any trouble with focus, as a matter of fact I think their focus is awesome. Let me ask a question, has your child ever been playing a video game and you tried to get their attention? You could call them 10 times, have their favorite food ready, be going to one of their favorite activities, and they just keep playing and it’s like they can’t even hear you. They are totally focused on what they are doing. It’s like pulling teeth to get them to stop playing the game. Now, this is not me bashing video games. This could be anything that they totally love to do.
Now, let’s talk about homework. You sit them down to do homework and all hell breaks loose. They need a snack, a bathroom break, they start telling you about their day, or they have a million questions about everything unrelated to their homework.
It’s because they are not interested in doing their homework. Anything they are not interested in they won’t focus on.
See I believe as parents and teachers we have to teach them about self-discipline. In my school I teach our students and instructors that self-discipline is doing the right thing even when we don’t want to. And this can be really hard. I know I’m trying to teach my 5 year old kindergartner this when we sit down to do his homework. I also see it teaching martial arts. The skills and activities we do in our martial arts class that our students love they have total focus on. But the things they don’t like we can totally lose them if we don’t keep them engaged. This is why we are always training our instructors on how to keep the kids engaged in class.
If we don’t teach them self-discipline then focus won’t happen on anything they are not interested in. I was teaching focus tonight at the school.
We teach our students that focus means.
1. Seeing with your Eyes
2. Hearing with your Ears
3. Understanding with your Mind
4. Doing with your Body
When you use all of these together you are using focus. If you watch one of our classes you may see us use focus anchors to get the kids engaged in class.
Some of our focus anchors are
Eyes on Who? And the students answer Eyes on you Sir.
Or we yell Ready Stance and the Students Yell Yes Sensei as they get into their ready stance.
I know if we work together as a community we can help our kids learn to do better in school, at home, in sports, we need to remember they are young and most kids don’t even know what words like focus, discipline, respect and self-control mean but this is why we include the mat chats into our karate classes. It may take years but by the time our children go off to college they will have it down and be ready to take on anything this world throws at them.
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