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It’s testing week, so this is just a note about how I test for belts.

Jimmy Johnson once said: “I’m totally consistent; I treat everybody differently.”

My testing procedure is the same. Every student is different. Every student is having a different experience. The goal is to have each student do the material well enough to pass to the next belt, but how each student gets there might be different. There are physical, mental, and emotional elements that go into it as well, and it’s important to remember that it’s an art, not a science.

If I have a student lacking in confidence, I might make them stay up in front and hit them six different ways with forms and techniques. Or I might push them as far as I think I can, and then pass them to the next level. Or make them wait, and come back, and do it again. It’s an individual decision based on may factors, some of which I might not have even quantified myself.

And then the next student might do each thing once, and pass in what appears to be an easy test. But the second person didn’t need the work, and the first person did. If someone needs physical conditioning, they should expect the test to be physically demanding, while another student might face a more technical test. If someone is pushing ahead of the curve, either by age or by time on the mat, they should expect a more challenging test – because they need to prove to me that they are ready to move up when he or she is already ahead of the curve. The hardest Brown Belt test I ever did was for a student who was so far ahead of the curve that I would have felt comfortable promoting her with no test at all; but she had something to prove.

You might see someone walk up in front and pass, and not understand why it was so easy, and not know what happened yesterday, or over the past month. Without the big picture, you don’t know what’s going on. And I will admit that I am less than willing to spend a lot of time explaining the decision making process, in part because it’s not easily tied down to scores on a page. We don’t have a clock or a scoreboard here, and a win for one student might not be enough to let another move forward.

You might see someone fail a test while apparently doing everything well, and then another person miss some kicks on kicking set or forget some techniques and still pass. Those cases come down to whether or not the total body of work was good enough to justify passing them up, and sometimes the overall level is enough to overlook one big miss. And sometimes there was no big miss, but the overall level didn’t sing to me. I know when someone is good enough to pass, and when they are not, and I go with what I feel.

And sometimes it’s about taking someone who’s been working hard, understanding that it’s a step, not an end, and moving them into position to move ahead with some positive energy.

It may seem arbitrary, uneven, and sometimes even unfair. That’s why, even though there are some aspects of science in what we do – it’s still an art.

Like Jimmy Johnson, I am very consistent in that I treat everyone differently. This isn’t about banging a square peg into a round hole.

It’s easier to understand when you are on the mat then when you are sitting in the bleachers.

This should be a good week of testing! I’ll see you on the mat.

Sifu