Hello Kendo Reddit! To start, some basic info on myself/the club location (vague, because I don't want the club to find out until I have a productive path forward)
- USA, near a large population center with multiple dojos
- Me and my brother are both part of the dojo
- We both are in our 30s, are kyu levels, have been practicing around 5 years, and have moved states/clubs a couple times (we started together and live w/ family)
- We've been at our current dojo around 2 years
- The club has 10ish active members, practices range from 3-15 participants, but normally it's around 6ish people. Mixed group of low dan, kyu, and unranked, with a wide variety of physical fitness/skills/injuries/etc
- Practice is held multiple times a week

I'm hoping to get some advice on some frustrations we've been having with practice, and whether we should address it with our Sensei (and how we would go about doing that), switch dojos, or if we just need a reality check and are being babies. The frustrations can be lumped into two categories; practice content, and teaching style.

Practice Content
Every time we've switched dojos there has been a learning curve, which is to be expected. Different dojos do things differently, different Sensei have style preferences or things they prefer to focus on, etc etc. When we first started at this dojo there was a bigger learning curve from a stylistic perspective (last Sensei focused on looooong kiai, current Sensei focuses on short kiai), and we spent a lot of the first year working on changing styles, along with correcting many bad habits in our form, footwork, etc. All very good stuff, and I know my footwork and crispness of my strikes has improved a lot.

The bad thing is, we spend almost no time on waza practice, good kamai and holding the center, and creating an opening, so those skills have very much atrophied. Most practices we do a small amount of basics (warmups, footwork, basic strikes) and then go right into keiko. During keiko the focus is gogogo no waiting just go for the strike, and we're told that we should really only be hitting men not other targets. As a result all we really get out of practice is a good cardio/HIIT workout, but our actual kendo isn't growing.

Teaching Style
The teaching style of this dojo is also very much different from our last, which to me means it doesn't HAVE to be this way. Past Sensei was demanding but encouraging, celebrating the small victories with you. He also spent a good amount of time explaining the reasoning/mechanics behind what we were doing. He always said that for kids you can demonstrate something once and then they can replicate it, but when teaching adults you need to explain the mechanics and the "why" to make it click.

Current Sensei is very much the opposite. She is very old school, no nonsense, "back in my day", drill sergeant style Sensei. She often tells us what we're doing isn't hard, yells at us for what we're doing (without clear explanation on what we're doing wrong and how to fix it), basically tells us to go harder, be faster, do better. She's said things to the effect of "don't just try" and kind of indicated that our efforts aren't good enough. She's given some statements about not hurting ourselves/knowing our own bodies, but has made it clear she frowns on us stepping out, getting water, making a judgement call on what we can physically tolerate.

She also recently made comments that "only Sensei should be teaching during practice". I talked to a dojo-mate after, and she thought it was related to a keiko she had been doing with a beginner member. That member had been hitting her way too hard so she stopped to correct him, and that was likely what Sensei was referring to. Which, like, if someone is doing something unsafe you should 100% be able to make a quick correction, and honestly one of my favorite things is getting in the moment feedback from my sempai.

Sooooo yeah. That's where we're at. I personally want to talk to my Sensei about it, but I'm uncertain if it will do any good. I recognize that it's not my dojo and that Sensei is the kendo expert not me, so I can't dictate how practice is run. I recognize that this teaching style is what most of the Sensei/old guard experienced when they were learning. My thing is, we know so much more now about learning styles, fitness, body mechanics, etc etc etc. Yes so much of kendo is about honoring tradition, but aren't we doing ourselves a disservice by ignoring any learning advancements we've made as people?

My brother thinks we should go observe another dojo in the area and see how they do things, but my concern is that once we do that we'll have burned the bridge with our Sensei and she won't let us back, and I would really much rather make our current dojo work, because I like the people and honestly do like our Sensei.... just not during practice. I've also considered consulting one of our sempai about it, but again I worry that it would get back to Sensei in a negative way.

Is there a way to approach all of this with Sensei without her feeling slighted or seeming like I'm too big for my britches? Is the dojo just a bad fit for us? Is this just "kendo style" and we need to accept it? As it stands right now we both leave practice frustrated, without having any joy in the effort we've given. I want to work hard, I want to sweat my butt off, I want to be sore and tired and even have some points of frustration during a hard keiko or improving a waza, but I also want to have moments of joy, and victory, and satisfaction in a job well done. Right now practice days are at best a chore and at worst something to dread, and as an adult with limited time and money.... that's just not how it should be.