Student Contributions

[Goju 4 Life]

Every other saturday I wake up very early, around 7. This is really really early for a teen. And I go help my instructor maintain the school for a couple of hours before the first class starts. He says that he expects everyone to do that. But, I'm the only one. When snow needs to be shoveled he does it, when anything needs to be done either he does or he has to ask someone to do it.

My opinion is that a karate school is a unique business because it's focus is not the bottom line. So, people should help out. What do you guys think?

oh: Also if I let my instructor break his body doing janitorial work, who will teach me martial arts in ten years. I want to keep him around as long as possible.

[karatekid1975]

My school does that. Eveyone who is 2nd gup/kyu or above is on a cleaning team (there's four teams). My team is cleaning this saturday, in fact. Each team cleans once per week, and what ever they can do during the week if they have time. The students who are not on a team help out when they can (like picking up trash outside or what have you). The ones who are on a team get credit for it. On the back of our attendence cards, there's a place to date and inital. This goes towards testing. If you don't clean, you don't test. Unless there is a valid reason that you can't or couldn't.

So yea, I agree that it's a good idea. It keeps the school clean, the students learn to work together, and the instructors can worry about teaching, not cleaning.

[AndrewGreen]

Depends on the business.

If it is a club type atmosphere, your fees are relitavely low and the instructor isn't making much, if anything then yes, help out. Otherwise he'll probably increase the fees to pay for that stuff.

If it's a full blown commercial school with all the bells and whistles, then there is probably a cleaning person hired to take care of that, and you (the students) are already paying for that

[younwhagrl]

Yeah the school I train at...we are train out of Fitness gym so they clean up for us...but the place I teach at..we have our own building so we have students come in and help out with cleaning, and it's a really great thing to have! We don't have carpet as of yet but the students help out mopping the floor and cleaning windows and things, it's fun to come an hour and a hlf early to clean and talk.

We have been talking about opening the bigger part of our school, we have two halves one is bigger than the other, well..it has door that connects both and our students say that they will help us with that in any way they can!