Update Biographical and Educational Details
on Ms. Tammy Yard-McCracken
Credited VS Unaccredited Degrees, licensing, educational standards and the Case of Tammy Yard McCracken, a doctor by some standard but not others
Experts? More Questions about Tammy Yard-McCracken, self described violence dynamic expert
For several reasons, I recently attended an event called "Violence Dynamics Seminar -Boston." It was an interesting event, and good for a few blog posts. (Especially if I put "BUY MY BOOKS!!" in big letters on each post, thus reinforcing the idea that the trip was a business expense related to my writing.)
It was a significant event to most people involved, and drew from a wide distance. Three people, two participants and one academic observer, came from Europe specifically for this, and others came from as far as Ontario. I drove four hours, although I did visit friends in Boston the next day. Some people not only planned to attend the entire four days, but some had attended the seminar before when it was held at a different location or locations. Approximately 25 students attended the day I was there, plus the instructors, school staff and other assistants and the academic observer, as well as two of the most beautiful dogs I've ever seen. (the owner has a pair of wonderful Alaskan Malamuts, at least that's what I think they are called.)
Although the event was four days long, Thursday through Sunday, I only attended on Saturday for reasons having to do with time, money, other obligations, and balancing priorities. Here's a few things that would have been good to know before I went. I'd never really been to something like this and perhaps other will find them useful. Although event specific, like so many things in life, perhaps readers can deduce the principles behind them and apply them to other events like this.
1) Hotel
The hosting school, Metrowest Jiu Jitsu in Nattick, a town near Boston (most of Boston is actually "a town near Boston" ), had arranged for a "block of suites" at the Marriot Hotel in Nattick. Since one of my goals was to meet people, I decided to stay there. The host school had arranged for a special rate for event participants at the hotel. However, the cost was still quite high, at least to someone like me whose last hotel stay was for 20$ a night in Hanoi and whose last US hotel stay was in a Motel Six.
Despite being in the "block of suites" I did not see or meet anyone from the event, not a single one, during my two night stay at the motel.
Which is not to say the hotel was not a nice hotel or the stay unpleasant. It was quite nice. However, the extra expense did not help me achieve my goals and I could have saved a lot of money by staying in a cheaper hotel with cooking facilities. (The room in this hotel was quite large, very nice, very clean, and the bed huge. However, I needed none of that, and I like hotels with cooking facilities and free breakfasts even if it's just a couple bananas, a granola bar, and a cup of cheap coffee that you can grab and go.)
So, my advice is, unless you have heard of specific benefits otherwise, consider carefully before booking the selected hotel and make sure you assess what the advantages and disadvantages of doing so are. Do not expect an event like this to be a convention like atmosphere in the hotel where people meet, greet, and mingle easily.
2) Bare feet
I do martial arts and have done them off and on for, at this point, over thirty years (much of that off, by the way.) Some martial arts are done with shoes or sneakers on and some are done barefoot (and there may be some crazy martial art somewhere where people wear something else on their feet, Russian cossack boots perhaps, but I'm not too aware of it.)
The martial art I've done the last few months is Filipino and we practice wearing foot gear. And this is what I'd expected at a "reality based" training event.
However, I was a bit surprised that it was done barefoot. I've done barefoot martial arts before, both aikido and tae kwon do, but I wasn't expecting it.
Of course this makes sense as the event was held on the mats at a jiu jitsu school, and jiu jitsu is generally done barefoot but if I'd known beforehand I would have done a better job of carefully clipping my toe nails. This may sounds silly to some people, but it's an important safety and etiquette point. Sharp toenails can scratch a person by accident.
3) Physical demands.
I'm over half a century old at this point. The doctor has placed some restrictions on me participating in some physical activities. Of course, I never cared before but that may be one reason I have to be so strict now. And one reason I went was because I thought the event would help me flesh out my martial arts and self defense goals, particularly in this new phase of my life where I can't just pick up and spar and push and shove people willy nilly, getting knocked on the ground and jumping back laughing. (Actually I can and have done this since being told not to, but fortunately the doctor did not see me do it.)
By contrast, I think the last two day martial arts seminar that I attended (and drove equally far but in a different direction) was a Marc Denny / Dog Brother's Seminar in New York City almost two decades ago which involved all kinds of rough and tumble and lots of physical interaction. (I've also participated in bobsledding and competed in the related sledding sport of skeleton. So I'm not completely adverse to getting banged around or taking risks. On the other hand, I followed instructions, sadly, and erred on the side of safety.)
Regardless, there were multiple activities in my one day of attendance that I could not participate in. This was both socially embarrassing and emotionally frustrating. It also meant that instead of participating in a day of exercise and physical interaction, I spent a day watching other people participate in exercise and physical interaction. (and the thought went through my mind that I was definitely not getting my money's worth out of the event. Of course, none of this can be blamed on the instructors. The schedule was decided in advance. But perhaps I should have done more research or asked ahead of time.)
And, for what it's worth, the experience of not being able to participate did indeed help me flesh out what my goals were. Still, it might have been better to have researched how much I could participate in advance.
3) People
I was surprised by the kinds of people who were there. In hindsight, I probably shouldn't have been, but I was expecting a different sort of group. (In fact, I realized later that I had written the wrong name-- "Master's of Mayhem" --in one of my schedule books. This is a different self defense type seminar with a different focus but overlapping curriculum and different instructors.) The original Violence Dynamics seminar had been founded in part by Marc MacYoung, a self defense author and philosopher (Marc is a fount of interesting ideas, really). Marc and I both wrote for Paladin in the 1990s and have been swapping communications since then. (In fact, I'm unreasonably proud that I was invited as a contributor to his recent collection, "Beyond-Picket-Fence-Outside the Middle-Class Bubble.")
Back before Facebook, Marc used to have an internet group called "the Animal list" where large numbers of interesting people from around the world would discuss violence dynamics, self defense, and cooking. (Yeah, lots of cooking. You haven't really experienced the joys of the internet fully, by the way, until you've watched an emotional exchange between a tough Texas biker and an equally tough Australian bouncer over how to properly barbecue. Someone once described it as a "cooking list with a violence problem." )
So . . . who was there?
3) Student population
First, it's worth mentioning that this was quite an expensive event. $485 for the full four days or $175 for a single day, far outside the price range of most who might casually consider buying a ticket. (Not to mention the cost of transportation, food, lodging, and time missed from work for the event.)
Therefore the students either must be able to pay this or have a sponsor of some kind, perhaps an employer who wished them to be familiar with the content offered. Although I did not meet anyone who told me they were in this category, Kasey Keckeison did say more than once that they had changed the name of one portion of the program from "Wreck a Neck" to "High End Use of Force" in order to make it more acceptable to law enforcement agencies who might pay to have their employees attend the program.
I only met one person who said the program fit his professional responsibilities and goals, a European who worked in retail store security and for whom confronting and detaining shop lifters was part of his professional responsibilities. Of course, there may have been others who did not mention their background or motives for attending.
Nevertheless, the bulk of the attendees were people with good jobs, disposable income, and good dental plans who had been into martial arts for years. They came because they felt the program would help them fill in important gaps in their training and knowledge and offer new perspectives, although there were a couple who were spouses or children of people studying martial arts and said the whole thing was new to them. (Despite what some would advertise, martial arts and self defense study are usually not the same thing although there is an overlap.) The program did this and the attendees who I spoke to seemed quite satisfied.
Among the people I had the chance to speak to were students and practitioners of Krav Maga, various forms of Jiu Jitsu (it was held at a Jiu Jitsu school after all), and silat although I am sure there were others present as well. However, it's worth mentioning that it was my impression that many attendees were there because they wished to understand violence, not necessarily because they had experienced large amounts of violence. In other words, this was not a good crowd to hang out and swap weird stories of things one has been through or seen. It seemed to be more of a "this will be useful if I ever have to use my art" crowd, although I did not get a chance to speak with everyone. Consider this just my impression, nothing more.
In 2013 and 2014 (if I recall correctly) I'd been to two other events held in the Boston area by Rory Miller, one of the instructors, and there was surprisingly little overlap between those people and the attendees at this event, just one as far as I know. (I'd even joined a Hung Gar Kung Fu club in Boston Chinatown following an invite that stemmed from a chance encounter at a Rory Miller seminar.)
I was also surprised by how unimportant Facebook seemed to be in publicizing this event. Before I'd gone, there had only been five people who had signed for it on Facebook and I'd worried that it would be under-attended.
4) Instructor population
There are several programs that travel the country and the world offering material designed to present understanding of and response to real world violence to martial artists and other interested people. I'd never been to one before, and since I had recently done that most adult of things, taken a mundane job where I work in a closely supervised environment doing duties that no one really thinks are interesting in order to better meet my obligations to other people, I decided to take the weekend, get away to Boston, visit friends, hang out in Boston Chinatown, and attend a day of this seminar. (As mentioned, I'd actually written the name of the wrong event in my appointment book and never realized it until a week later.)
This one had four instructors. In hindsight, it was heavy on the presence of law enforcement people. Now do I have anything against law enforcement people per se? No, of course not. One of my friends of many decades is a cop and I've worked for years in both Emergency Medical Services and large event, concert, and institutional security, all activities where you often find yourself allied with the police. On the other hand, if you automatically assume that the police are always the good guys and treat everyone fairly because the legal system is essentially a quest for justice and truth, well, let's just say your life has been very different from mine. Once you've seen law enforcement target an innocent person, falsifying evidence and hiding things that could prove the charged person innocent, something I've seen more than once, then your view of police and courts will be forever changed. Of course, it doesn't help that I am from Schenectady, a place where the police have a proven record of misconduct and corruption .
Kasey Keckeisen is a SWAT police officer in Minnesota with a municipal police department and sheriff's office. (They share a SWAT team recruiting from a few agencies for the area.) He is also a judo and jujitsu instructor and among h is activities is Police Activity Judo (see page 13 of this document.)
Tammy Yard-McCraken is married to a police officer. She's also a Krav Maga instructor and worked as a trauma therapist for years in Texas and reportedly earned an MS in Professional Counseling from the University of Houston-Clear Lake. (By the way, and I genuinely did not intend this to be a smear piece, although McCraken is a very good instructor and speaker, she identified herself as Dr Tammy Yard-McCraken on her bio. If one is interested, her PhD comes from an exclusively on-line school called the Eisner Institute. I am uncertain as to whether or not it is accredited. The matter is being actively discussed in a few internet forums and it may not be. If this was intended as an attack piece, which it is not, I would chase the matter down and see if there is a publicly available dissertation as is expected with most accredited PhD programs. I'd also dig into what "holistic psychology" is exactly. I've been involved in the trauma field and it is full of people whose credentials should be carefully checked. Back in the 1990s, I spent a lot of time and energy helping the falsely accused. False allegations often begin with someone who is exaggerating their credentials and working above their level of expertise. )
Rory Miller, of course, is a former corrections officer. (He's also one of the most interesting intelligent people I've met with an ability to examine things, turn them around, and come up with interesting, useful, easily understood lessons and patterns from them. I have read six books by Rory Miller and watched four videos where he lectures, teaches, or demonstrates. All were well worth reading or watching. Three are reviewed on this blog. Yes, he's a corrections officer, but I think if someone I loved were incarcerated or had to spend the night in jail, something that I believe can happen to anybody, anytime, for little to no reason at all, I'd want Rory Miller to be supervising while it happened. If the very idea of a seminar like this is of interest to you, read Rory Miller's books . Watch his DVDs too. His material on communication and understanding human violence is particularly worth reading. (Yeah, I said read mine. Do that please. On the other hand, there is a very real chance that Rory's books are better then mine. In fairness, my last book, a novel about an EMT with relationship issues in Schenectady in the 1980s is still seeking a publisher, and my next book, a guide for wargamers on Roman Gladiators, is still being written. My wonderful books will be written and people will like them, I promise. )
Randy King is said to have a background in club and large event security and travels around giving talks and seminars. He also has a youtube channel and a podcast where he discusses and teaches on self defense and martial arts. I've seen it a couple times and it wasn't bad. I don't do podcasts so I can't judge them. I'll try to write a blog post about Randy King's lesson. He is not, it seems nor has he ever been, a police officer. Randy and I are both contributors to the book Beyond-Picket-Fence-Outside the Middle-Class Bubble edited by Marc MacYoung. On the other hand, when I told Randy about this, he said he hadn't actually read the book himself, Don't make this mistake. Don't be like Randy, at least not in this way. Go read Beyond-Picket-Fence-Outside the-Middle-Class Bubble .
All four teach quite well and are dynamic speakers. On the other hand, I was a bit disappointed that on the day I was there, neither McCraken or King demonstrated any physical skills. I would have been curious to see them move a bit and do things. Still , it's highly likely that such videos exist and are highly accessible if one wishes to find them.
However, it's worth mentioning that when I arrived on Saturday morning, the instructors had been out the night before late partying, and three out of four were showing visible effects from this. No one really minded, as near as I could tell, but when I mentioned it to a friend, she thought it sounded irresponsible, particularly as in some cases it seemed to effect the way they perceived people or interacted with them.
Why all this talk of who and who is not a police officer? Saturday morning, Tammy Yard-McCraken, who was called "Tammy," gave a very good talk on self defense and use of force laws in Massachusetts. At one point in her talk, she asked if anyone present had been arrested for a use of force incident. If you find yourself being asked this in the presence of retired police officers or spouses of police officers who are cranky and half asleep yet forced to function and interact with people, remember the correct answer is "no" if you wish the day to go smoothly. Despite the question, this is not a good place to tell stories of having been arrested and what it was like on the Group W bench afterwards. This was probably my biggest mistake of the day, and I would advise you to doubly do so if you find yourself wandering around unable to fully participate, staring at the walls and mulling over the state of the world and your existence, not quite part of the group, while others throw each other on the ground and practice "wreck-a-neck" techniques in your presence.
5) Food
Finally, food in Nattick. If you attend a seminar hosted by Metrowest Jujitsu in Nattick I have two pieces of advice.
First, eat breakfast before you go. I did not and wound up buying a breakfast sandwich at the Common Cafe and Kitchen in Nattick. It was good but about twice as much as I'd normally pay for a breakfast sandwich. There were no cheap, convenient grab-and-go breakfast places near Metrowest Jiu Jitsu that I found.
Second, don't bring lunch though, Instead go to Lola's Deli on Main Street in Nattick and get the Prosciutto sandwich. It is amazing.
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