Reply #45: Good points! The instructor i s paramount, as is the case with

[ForrestGump]

just about anything that you learn. Remember the bad guy from "Karate Kid"? They ARE out there.

On the financial side, yep, everyone worthy of your custom is going to offer you a free lesson (perhaps more than one). Make the most of it, and preced it by I "I'd just like to watch" visit (or more than one). A decent instructor will welcome you. And some schools will try to sell you a 'contract' for such-and-such a period of time. They know they'll profit because of attrition rate; this seems particularly common among the basic minimall TKD schools that cover the USA. Avoid it, but if everything seems great otherwise, well, that's your decision to make.

Finally martial arts instruction - and this is sometimes a problem in the US because of attitudes - is not and should not be a case of you paying some dude to do a service for you. The relationships among students and between students and teacher(s) are - in traditional arts - deeply imbued with mutual respect and are essentially based in another culture's social traditions. You pay the instructor but this not a work-for-hire deal. And most martial arts instructors do not make much of aprofit on the deal - they do it because they love it, because they want to pass it on, and because it allows them to keep in shape, keep up their own training, and to learn from their students.