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Rachel Massey wrote:
Running a dojo has been a wonderful experience, but has become increasingly disheartening due to my inability to get students to stick. I had a wonderful student who had made it up to fourth kyu (from scratch) and was a terrific uke and had very solid aikido, but he left, and since then, things have gone downhill. I've never been able to get more than 8 students to practice on any consistent basis, and we are down to 3-4 at present. It could be my teaching style, my looks (overweight middle-aged woman), competition (lots of good aikido in the area, but I think we are the nicest group  ), or any number of things that I might not be aware of. |
Hi Rachel,
You`re not alone out there, I`m going through a similar situation at the moment, albeit without the financial strains hitting me personally. My Sensei asked me to open a new satellite dojo in another part of town, on a different night. The purpose being threefold, 1. Attract new students from that area. 2. Give current students an extra practice night. 3. Give me somewhere to gain teaching experience (although I still teach the weekly kids class at the main dojo, and teach the senior class there once a month).
I`ve been open since the beginning of June, had 15 people on the mat the first night, 10 of which were first timers. 1 paid to sign up immediately after class and has never been back since
, but three signed up and came back for a month. Over the following couple of weeks a number of others signed up but again, stopped coming after a couple of weeks. Despite the odd night where I may get 8 on the mat, I am currently down to about 4 regulars.
Reasons that come to mind. A lot of people drift in from other arts, despite giving me the "how did that happen" looks when they fall over, and "this is excellent" type comments, very few of them stick with it for more than a couple of weeks, I am sure that this is part to do with the complexity of aikido (despite its simplicity
), it`s also lack of "fighting" and competition, just a hobby at which point other priorities take over, some are students and their studies have affected their schedules, and a few other reasons that I can think of. Alternatively, I may just be a crap teacher.
One thing that is disappointing for me though, is the number of students from the main dojo that don`t make use of the extra night. We have 35+ senior members at the club, and outside of the two senior teachers, only two members have changed their schedules to train with me week in week out, and only three others, all seniors, have put in the odd appearance. Having said all that, all classes in the club only seem to get a max of 9 or 10 students, so maybe it isn`t so bad.
On the financial front, we obviously don`t run the club for profit, everything goes back into the club to cover the hall rentals. We use two community centres over three nights, I have managed to get a small subsidy from the local council because we are a non profit group, and a small grant from the council for our activities with the kids. When we opened up the new club, myself and 3 other instructors donated the money to buy a new mat for the main class so that I could take our 20 year old mats over to the new club. At the moment, the combined subs from both clubs allows us to pay both locations, as long as it does that, we`ll keep them both open (we figure the new club has to be running for at least a year to establish),. But, we don`t pay anywhere near $1000 per month, closer to $300 for both locations together at the moment.
I feel your pain and know exactly what you are going through. Keep persevering though, your desire to teach is strong, as long as you feel you have something to offer, you`ll find a way. My mum lives in Minnesota, maybe when I come over to visit in the future, I`ll be able to come and visit you wherever you are teaching. I wish you the best of luck in your endeavours.
Regards
Bryan