Thursday, August 6, 2009

Proud to Announce Two Purple Belt Promotions

I am proud to announce the recent promotion of two of my students, Glenn and Jenny, to purple belt. These two were two of my first students who started soon after I founded my dojo back in January 2006.

Both of these students lead busy lives, one being a doctor, the other being both a store manager and a father. That being said, they have continued to balance their lives enough so that they could progress in their Jiu-jitsu training, while maintaining their devotion to their other pursuits and commitments.

Glenn and Jenny are both very active people. In fact, neither of them took much of a break after their tests (which lasted over 2 hours). Jenny cycled home (from Richmond all the way to New Westminster) and Glenn went home and mowed the lawn.

Both of these students have come a long way in their training through dogged persistence and a love of the art. I am very proud of the progress they have made over their time at the dojo.

3 comments:

John W. Zimmer said...

Congratulations Glenn and Jenny!

Wow it sounds like it was a long test and a well earned promotion. I remember back to when I was getting my first few belts - each one was special because I had never achieved one before. You need to attain the next rank to get to the next one... enjoying the experience is so much the better.

Again congratulations!

Anonymous said...

Just how advanced is purple belt in your system? In ju-jutsu the normal order (taken from judo) is yellow-orange-green-blue-brown-black but to me it's pretty limited and if you want to give people a good base you'll have to cram so much material into the requirements for one belt, which maybe too hard and discouraging for new students. I've been thinking about my own gameplan when I'll become sensei myself (5 years seems to be a good learning-period) and I'm thinking about either reverting to the old 10 kyu standard of koryu-jujutsu/ninpo (rank designated by stripes on a green belt, until first dan is attained) or adding a few other colour-belts. Especially when you want to introduce basic-weapon handling and a decent ground-program into the kyu-grades it'll be difficult to fit everything into the standard 6 kyu-system. What do you think of this? It'll be a long time before I could actually teach myself but it doesn't hurt to dream and planning and putting together a curriculum has become somewhat of a hobby for me.

Greetings,

Zara

Lori O'Connell said...

Purple is between green and blue.

Your reasons for wanting to add belt levels is similar to my reason for having added the purple belt. I had a lot of curriculum I wanted to cover but was having trouble finding a place for it. What you are thinking of doing can make sense in the context for which the idea was conceived.

Keep dreaming, Zara! :)