Friends can be one of the greatest gift's ever

It's tough to make friends.  It's even tougher to make good friends.  One of the big changes we have made in the past five years at our school is to understand that socially things have changed dramatically.  It's not for me to judge whether it's good or bad that things have changed, but to instead adapt to my students needs.  I recognized that many of my students struggled to make friends outside of class.  We decided to tackle that issue head on and here is what we did.  We decided that we would have more activities at our school that invited the friends of our students.  We broke them up by age so that they could relate to others in their peer group more easily and just had fun.  The other unique thing we do is that we did not market or try and recruit them as students.  Did that get you to scratch your head a bit?  I know it fly's in the face of conventional marketing wisdom, but at the the same time it makes for a different experience for both the new friends and our school.  It's honest and it's a great service to help our students interact with others they may never meet.  Socializing is now something that is focused on in each and every class because martial arts should go beyond just kicking and punching.  Until next Master T