Bunch

I love it when there are big shakeups at our Jiu-Jitsu school that really have nothing to do with me. Just such a thing is happening right now, and I get to watch, and participate on the periphery.

Every so often, somebody from the White Belt class gets invited up to the advanced class. Usually this happens shortly before their belt exam, one they have completed about 80 classes or so. At about that point, adults get promoted. If the student is too young for the new-belt rules, they join as White Belts until they get old enough to do the test.

Due to the small size of our school, it's pretty rare that this happens to more than one person at a time.

Switching to the "big kids" class can be intimidating. The lessons are mind-bogglingly more complex than those in the White Belt classes. An good example would be the material we were working on a couple of days ago. It assumed that students would have at least two levels of preparatory material before attempting the lesson. Out of the ten students on the mat, only one of us had ever done it before.

Also, of course, students get their first exposure to free-rolling. For about a half hour of every class, we all do little 5-minute rolls with a number of partners. New people really have no idea what to expect. This is also where they find out that everything that they learned in the White Belt class can be easily countered by the least-skilled of the people they will face.

We are not the kind of group that considers new members to be "fresh meat" to be bullied and intimidated, but even so it can be pretty disheartening.

One such new person to the group is Alex. Her transition started maybe two months ago. She is a very eager student, but pretty tiny compared to most of us, and too young to test for a Blue Belt yet. She has managed to put up with the complexity, and the rolling. She actually seems to like both.

She was there for both the White Belt and advanced classes last night, but something strange was happening at the later session.

She wasn't the only White Belt sitting in the circle. Mason was there, and so was Mack. For both of them, this is their very first week in the group.

Mason, like Alex, is only 15 and will remain a White Belt for a while. He is also one of the smaller people. Mack is an adult, and fully adult-sized, and is already part way through his Blue Belt exam.

They make up a group of three.