Mat Hill

So she was injured!

The plot thinnens!

(There follows a lot of second guessing with possibly limited value but based on simple observations of various interactions in various dojo over a long time! This is not meant to imply anything about this particular woman, but merely to illustrate the wonderful diversity of the precious human snowflake... I should can that tone - I forget that people write that kind of thing seriously on the net sometimes! )

Maybe she was a just difficult customer... hence the mobile incident. Maybe she was one of those freeloaders. Maybe she uses one of those recurring mysterious 'bad back' injuries to get out of practice and cleaning up and stuff when she doesn't feel like it, and got all embarassed, not being brazen enough to lie completely about it and answer 'Yes' to the 'Are you injured?' question. She may have been caught on the hop with a guilty conscience.

Then again maybe she is genuinely injured and didn't answer yes because she is profoundly embarassed about it. This may also give her an excuse to leave her phone on when there's a high possibility of a call coming so she has an excuse to leave the mat for a breather without drawing attention to her 'weakness'. I was the assistant instructor a few times for a few sessions with a very badly disfigured and badly injured accident victim who wanted to sample aiki ... I asked her not to do anything she felt uncomfortable with, and said not to worry about feeling uncomfortable in the first place, because beginners always feel uncomfortable about things anyway. I thought I'd done everything I could: not bending over backwards which might make her feel more awkward, but not treating her quite the same as everyone else as this might have glossed over her probalem and made her think I wasn't serious enough or didn't recognise her injury as as serious as it was... giving her a tad more than the usual encouragement I give beginners, and making sure she had ample opportunity not to do the things that would cause her distress. She didn't come back after about three sessions, and furthermore, she didn't tell anyone why. I was a bit upset!

I found out later from her mentor who'd come with her, who I happened to meet, that she'd been embarassed assuming the kneeling position prior to learning a forward roll as a precursor to maeukemi because it meant she had to open her legs more than she felt comfortable as a woman. Now of course, I've had many many women on the mat and none of them have had that problem, or at least voiced it, before, so I can only gather that it was her particular quirk... and then maybe as a quirk of human nature, she wanted to be recognised as a woman, perhaps even more so since her accident, which may lead to embarassment in unsuspected places.

So, maybe your case was embarassed Nick.

...[/random speculation]

Anyway, i still think you were right in what you said. Of course, in future putting it the other way round may be better, 'We always help put the mats away after class... unless you're injured in some way?' or many of the other excellent suggestions on the board.

I've gotta laugh at the third person on this thread agreeing with 'everyone' or 'the majority'... Sorry Leon, not picking on you, it's just statistical chance! You've just agreed with the majority, when if you count the number of people who said Nick was bad, and the number of people who said Nick was good, and the number of people who didn't express clearly one way or the other you may find that including yourself 13 people said Bad, 14 people have said Good, and 7 are undecided/indifferent/unclear/non-judgmental/other. Therefore, you are in and agreeing with a minority! There's nice wee example of selective observation for you!

Of course, my selective observation is deciding who is undecided/indifferent/unclear/non-judgmental/other... so in a parallel universe you may just be right!

Josh, yep, that agrees pretty much with my experience in Japan and the observation from my previous post. I find it interesting that most of the people in Japan on this thread said that Nick was bad because she should have been treated like a guest... maybe most of the gaijin are too used to being treated specially over here, even long-termers who have reached some kind of exulted status! In my experience, whether you're treated like a guest anyway, you should be the first to ask/act on putting mats away etc... then you'll find you're treated a lot more naturally: like being asked directly to put the mats away!