Who Knew I Loved Kickboxing? A Tribute to Matt and His Class

I joined the YMCA on March 1, 2023.  I tried a number of different types of classes.  I liked indoor cycling, but yoga wasn't for me.  I enjoyed Zumba, and I hated Barre.  I was just trying as many things as I could to find what I might want to do regularly.  On March 8, I left school and said to my friends, "Well, tonight I try kickboxing.  That should be interesting."  

I approached Matt, the instructor, as I did in all new classes, and said, "I've never done this before.  What do I need to know?"  His response was, "Well, first of all, don't take yourself too seriously."  This was good advice for someone who was trying new things and likely to be pretty bad at most of them for a while.  What I found was not just a workout, but a source of joy.  It was the first class that I knew I would return to every single week.  When I called my mom that night, I said, "It turns out I love kickboxing.  Who knew?"  This class quickly became and has remained the highlight of my week for the past fourteen months.  When Matt was out of town, I took something else and enjoyed it, but I always felt that week was missing something.  Every Wednesday night, I looked forward to jabbing, crossing, uppercutting, kicking, and grinning from ear to ear while Matt bounced around the room, shining glitter down on every member of the class.  

There is something truly special about watching a person do what he loves, and you can tell Matt loves teaching this class.  He feeds off of the energy in the room.  I also have Matt in a weightlifting class, and he is fantastic in that one too, but I have told him before that watching him teach kickboxing is like sitting in a window with sunlight coming through it.  There is just a warmth and joy in it that is exceptional. 

This week, we had the last kickboxing class we are likely to have for a while (although I'm still trying to write the perfect comment card to get it back), and I am so sad I don't really have words.  I plan to write next week about the neurological reasons your brain finds all change stressful, so I won't go into that here; but we all know that some changes are more painful than others.  I've been thinking a lot about why that is.  Here's the conclusion I've reached.  If your heart is broken by a loss, it indicates that the thing you had was irreplaceably special.  (I have the Coldplay song running through my head - "Tears stream down your face. When you lose something you cannot replace.")  This class was just that - an irreplaceably special source of joy, love, and confidence in my life. While I am not losing Matt because I will still have him in the weightlifting class, the joy of his kickboxing class is not something that can be replicated.  I am so grateful to have had it for the last fourteen months.  Multiply that joy by the 20 years he has been teaching it and the number of "mes" there have been, and there is a lot of joy in the world now that there would not have been if it had not been for Matt's faithful service to the Y.

Thank you, Matt, for the love you put into teaching.  Thank you for being an amazing educator.  Thank you for putting up with me when I am clingy and possessive and "a little much."  Thank you for being a reference for me.  Thank you for the twenty years you have taught such a beautiful class.  

Learning Should Be Joyful

I have been teaching for 25 years, long enough to see pendulum swings in a thousand ways.  From a focus on science to a resurgence of the arts back to STEM obsession.  From all phonics to whole language and back to phonics.  

Right now, we are in an upsetting trend of people who only value education as career training.  I am not against the idea that we can use what we learn in school for our jobs, but I am against the notion that everything learned in school should be focused on how you plan to use it after school, leading to people who complain that we don't teach kids to file their taxes or sew on buttons (yes, there is a weird contingent of internet people who won't let this go) or that students should only learn those things that they will use in a job 

This notion is disturbingly utilitarian.  If something is only valuable if it is useful, we will stop being learners and become consumers, judges, and grouches.  Education will become a commodity, so we will learn less as we cull the curriculum.  Content will be prejudged for usefulness, leading us to look at everything through a utilitarian lens.  All of this is bad, but the worst part is that there will no longer be joy in learning anything we don't immediately judge to be useful.  If we allow curiosity to be a defining feature of our lives, we will find joy in learning new things without insisting that it be something we will use later.

I have written on this blog before about my chemistry teacher insisting that I take honors physics.  Had I possessed the view that I should only learn those things that would be part of my future job, I would not have taken honors physics, would not have had Mr. Barbara, and would not have found that I adored physics.  I mean, I loved it so much that I came home every day and did my homework immediately just so I could do more physics.  While I ultimately did make my love of physics into a career, it was because I found so much joy in it that I wanted to give that to others.  When my students leave me, I don't try to turn them all into engineers, but I do try to make it so they see physics in their everyday lives and feel joy in knowing how things work.

I want students to be lifelong learners because there is joy in learning.  That won't happen if we view it merely as job training.  It has been 11 months since I joined the YMCA, and I have spent the last year learning new things.  I've learned about weights and kickboxing and Zumba.  I've learned about indoor cycling, and yesterday I took a certification course to learn how to teach indoor cycling.  At the age of 47, I have found new sources of joy in my life because I was open to learning new things.  My granny had a sister named Grace, who took Greek at her local university when she was in her late 70s.  Her career was long behind her.  She took it because she wanted to.  She took it because learning gave her joy.  I want to be like Grace when I grow up.  I'm not talking about making things easy to make them joyful; Grace was learning Greek, for heaven's sake.  In fact, it is sometimes more joyful to learn something hard because it is more of an accomplishment.

Keep learning.  Teach your kids to keep learning.  Model a love of learning for your students.  Show them that there is joy in learning, no matter how old you are.  

Thanksgiving 2023 - Thankful for the Alexander YMCA

My annual Thanksgiving post is usually about teachers and schooling.  If you look at the posts from previous years, you will find odes to my childhood teachers, current administrators, and colleagues.  During the pandemic year, I even expressed gratitude for the supply closet at school.

This year's post is also about teachers, but they are not teachers in the academic sphere.  They are my fitness instructors at my local YMCA.  Last week, I compared their teaching techniques to those used by academic teachers because it is amazing how incredibly sound their teaching practices are (and I suspect they don't even know it because they are likely not reading books on cognitive science research).  This week, I just want to express my gratitude for them and for the entire staff of the Alexander YMCA by telling my story.

When I decided to give up the yearbook, people kept asking me what I was going to do with my time since I wouldn't be photographing every activity and then editing, uploading, and tagging pictures or spending time proofreading pages.  I thought about what I would have liked to have done with my afternoons all these years if they had been more flexible, and I realized that I wish I could have exercised more - well, at all.  I had an answer - "I'm going to join a gym."  Doing some research, I knew that Planet Fitness was the least expensive option, but when I started looking into it, I decided it did not have what I needed, accountability.  

I used to be disciplined about working out on my own at home, at least during the summer.  Regular readers, do you remember eight years ago when I walked 500 miles in the summer and then 500 more during the school year?  For whatever reason, in the last six years or so, all of that discipline evaporated.  I'd get about ten minutes in (or whenever it started to become difficult), and I would say, "Well, ten minutes is better than nothing" and just stop.  I still walked a lot in the summer, but during the pandemic, it became transportation rather than exercise, and it never went back to being an aerobic activity.  Going to a place with a lot of machinery wasn't going to fix that problem.  I needed group classes because I knew that I would not leave a class early in front of other people.  My friend, Meagan, said that she thought the YMCA would have what I needed.  I dropped by and took a tour, and she was exactly right.  (I don't think I've ever properly thanked Meagan for this suggestion.  Thank you, Meagan.)

By February, the month before I joined the YMCA, I was uncomfortable all of the time.  Although I don't weigh myself, I knew my pants didn't fit, and I was insistent on NOT buying new clothes.  (My Tuesday pants did their job because I would have had to write myself up for dress code for about a month if I had worn them.)  I was tired at the end of every day, so I came home to collapse, but that just made me more tired.  At school, if I dropped a pencil on the floor, I went to my desk to get a different pencil rather than bend over to pick it up.  By the time the yearbook was finished, so was I.  I was just sick of myself.

In March, I started taking classes at the Alexander Family YMCA on Hillsborough Street, and it could not have been a better decision.  I knew I was going to be pretty bad at everything for a while as I've never had much physical agility, strength, or coordination and, thus, no confidence about anything physical. The first thing Matt ever said to me was, "Don't take yourself too seriously," and it was the perfect perspective to have as I grew in this kind of learning because I could get the steps wrong, laugh at myself, and just keep going.  My original plan was to take as many kinds of classes as possible.  I thought I would do something different every day in March and then decide what to repeat.  That plan changed when I started falling in love with some of the instructors.  (See last week's post for more specifics.)  So, while I did try quite a few different types of classes, I fell into a pattern a lot more quickly than I expected because of these lovely people.  

Before joining, I was a little concerned that I might become one of those people who just donates money to the gym (you know, pays their dues but doesn't go).  That might have happened if I had joined just any gym, but after falling in love with these instructors and their classes, I found myself disappointed if I had some other commitment that prevented me from attending one of my YMCA classes.  There is such a spirit of love, encouragement, and joy at the Y that I don't think I would have found at "a gym."

Initially, I had only one goal - stay through every minute of a class; I could worry about things like speed and intensity after I was in the habit of not giving up in the middle of classes.  I chose positions as far from the door as possible, so I couldn't just slip out without having to take a "walk of shame."  While the instructors were pushing my body in some pretty taxing ways, there was only one time that I truly wanted to leave a class.  It was a Barre class (no fault of the instructor, but those moves are crazy to me). If there hadn't been people in there that I knew, I absolutely would have left.  When I came home that night and called my mom, I said, "Well, I'm pretty sure I hated that."  The next night, when I called her, I said, "I LOVE kickboxing!  Who knew?!?"  Finding what I loved (and didn't) was motivating and joyful.  I don't mind that I don't like some things because I love other things so much.

After the first two months, I decided it was time to start setting some real goals.  After asking a couple of spin instructors for advice, I stood up on a bike for the first time in May and decided to set a goal that I would stand every time it was cued by the end of summer, and I have kept doing that consistently.  The next night, I took Group Power.  I had been avoiding classes with weights (and words like power, sculpt, or strength), and I was shocked and delighted to find that I enjoyed choreographed group weightlifting to music.  The next morning, I was sore from head to toe even though I had used the lightest weights possible.  But I was hooked on taking it again.  Now, I'm including the larger-sized weights during warmup and legs and choosing the higher intensity options where we leave the ground.  I started to grow, not just physically, but in my level of confidence to try new things and challenge myself.  At the age of 47, this was a need in my life, even though I had not known it before.  

In the fall, Julie, the group fitness director asked if I would help with their annual fund campaign, and I jumped at the opportunity to give back to this organization in any way.  While my efforts didn't raise a ton of money, I learned so much about what the Y does for the community and was very excited to share that with others.  My Y story is important to me, but it is small compared to the impact they are having more broadly.  I am thankful for what they do for me and for underserved communities and for lower-income families and for people who might otherwise slip through the cracks in the system.

This year, I am most thankful for the Alexander YMCA in Raleigh, and I am especially grateful for the people who teach me and support me there - From the ones whose classes I take most regularly (Matt, Stacey, Jay, and Liz) to those I can only fit in sometimes (Julie, Gwen, Dean, Greg) and some of the classmates I have (David, Ellen, Lisa, Diane, Christie, Alex, Nick, Karen, Steven), you are sources of joy, and I look forward to seeing you every week.  I couldn't be happier to have you in my life.

The Hour Before Graduation

This will be a short post and mostly photos.  The graduation ceremony is always lovely, but it's not my favorite part.  My favorite parts are the hour before and the few minutes after the ceremony.  Our teachers robe up in the same room with the graduates.  There are happy conversations happening between teachers and their (almost former) students.

There are teachers taking selfies with students and each other.  It is a joyous time with just us.

My best friends and I take photos together, just like kids do.  This is the last year that our "Blue Pod + One" photo will look like this because Cheryl is leaving us for other employment.  It is also the last photo of all the Beths that will look like this one.

Even after all these years, teachers have some difficulty with their caps and gowns.  That hood is always impossible, and no one seems to know the right way to arrange it.

Just before the ceremony, we gather together and pray with them one last time.