He does have a record of poor communication with his staff. Apparently this all runs deep. (And every miscommunication is of course: my fault).
What I remember before I left in 2022 is that he told me if I want to use his proprietary curriculum, that I need to franchise under him. I told him I would use my own curriculum. That's when he stopped having time for me. He kept asking when I was leaving, I kept telling him after I'd get my 4th Dan, but eventually realized it wasn't going to happen. He had been cutting my teaching hours, cancelling private lessons, stopped teaching me my material during black belt classes, and prepared for life without me. That's why I left.
What he remembers is that he told me that if I want to get 4th degree under him, that I need to franchise under him. That I didn't agree to that, and that's why he didn't test me for 4th degree.
I'm actually going to give him the benefit of the doubt on this one and say he may simply not be remembering correctly exactly what was said. This was 3 or 4 years ago that this conversation happened at this point, and like I said in my previous post: he doesn't always have a perfect memory.
However, this means that when I told him I want to get a 4th degree under him, based on his remembering that I declined to test for 4th degree previously due to the requirement to franchise under him, that I was telling him I wanted to franchise under him as a branch.
Same thing with me expecting to get a KKW certificate. He remembers me telling him I didn't need it. He doesn't remember telling me I should get it anyway. His paperwork didn't say I would get a Kukkiwon certificate, and he has an email of me saying that the paperwork "looks good". That's because when I wrote the email, I was thinking I was going to get it. He pulled the, "If you weren't sure, you should've asked", which is a horrible cop out when there's a miscommunication. As I said earlier, there were a bunch of reasons for me to think I was getting a Kukkiwon certificate: I'm doing the Taegeuk forms (which are not a part of his curriculum), he is a Kukkiwon school, our previous conversation where he said he would give me both, the similarity of the paperwork and the requirement for my KKW Dan certificate, "Kukkiwon" being in the Korean word list. But he is technically correct that I agreed to the paperwork and the paperwork doesn't specify Kukkiwon certificate anywhere. So it's my fault.
(And if I push back too much I do think I won't get anything at all from him).
He even said if he gave me both, he couldn't give me his certificate and KKW certificate at the same time, which is utter bullcrap because I've gotten the other degrees at the same time. Unlike his memory of the conversation, I don't give him the benefit of the doubt on this one.
