Taekwondo Festival

Last Sunday I participated in a Taekwondo 'Festival' which was really cool!  Unfortunately I didn't get any videos of my performance, but I have several awesome videos  and TONS pictures of the kids, and a couple pictures of my performance.  I usually do Taekwondo with the older group of students, which only includes a few of my 6th graders, some middle schoolers and one high school student.  When I showed up for this event I was greeted by TONS of my younger students who were all too excited to see me doing something other than teaching, haha!

I thought this was taking place at some gym a few kilometers away, but it ended up being in MY school's gym in front of lots of parents.  This made me a little nervous, because I try to separate school and Taekwondo.  I have a certain standard of professionalism at school, and a bit of a relaxed attitude when it comes to Taekwondo.  It wasn't a bad thing, but it made the experience a little more nerve racking and interesting!

I took this picture, the rest I got from Master Lee.  (100 photos total)

I think these are 1st or 2nd graders, so I don't teach them, but aren't they ridiculously cute?

^^^ I rest my case.

This one in the yellow and black jacket is one of my favorite kids in my school.  His English name is Mason and he is one of my fourth graders.  Sometimes he is one of my classroom cleaners and he is just so cool!  He is the one jumping around in my video earlier in this post.  Actually on Monday he and 3 other students were cleaning my classroom and they came over to talk to me about this festival; "Ryan Teacher, Taekwondo good!"

I showed them the video of him jumping around, it was priceless.

These are the older students that do Taekwondo with me.  

Peace :)

You can actually see me taking one of the videos in the back of the gym!

Yes, they are performing to Ricky Martin, SMH.

This was me for 2 minutes, while Master Lee introduced me, waiting to begin.

Shizah! (start)

I was to perform three things: Pumsei 2, pumsei 3 and a bit of board breaking/kicking.  You can see pumsei 2 in my orange belt test video, and pumsei 3 in my upcoming belt video.  The board breaking was really cool and I wish I had the video.. 4 other students went and then I broke 4 boards.

I can honestly say that I am RARELY nervous, but I was so nervous for this once I got out there.  I was the only one to do a solo performance, and I stood out there for about 2 minutes while Master Lee introduced me in Korean.  The only thing I caught was he talked about how I'm a teacher and I play guitar a lot, haha.  I did really good though and got many compliments, what a relief (and experience)!