I'm the president of taijiquan society in my university. Our society started as a taichi class in the international society of our university but last year, we decided to make our class as a society activity so we can get extra funding. We done lot of promotion in fresher's week and we got like nearly 50 students in the beginning.
The problem is that we lost these students very fast because we teach taijiquan as a martial arts and fail to meet expectation of people who turn up for our class. At the end of academic year, we had 5-6 people including me and most of them done other martial arts previously. Now, these guys are quite happy with taijiquan but I have to be honest here. There are lot of social aspect to society activities and with this number we totally fail in that aspect. In fact, our class fail to retain quite few who are interested in martial aspect of taijiquan. Cheng Man Ching taichichuan being one of the softest style of taichichuan so not martial enough for some people didn't help.
Now two from last year graduated so we have only three to start this year and we are starting our new class for this academic year in two weeks (Brit uni start from late September). This year, my aim is to retain as many member as possible. My idea is to have two completely separate classes. One class in taichi/qigong class where purpose is to teach the form in shortest amount of time with litte of *real(martial)* taichi with lot of qigong exercise. The other class is sort of martial class where there are lot of physically demanding exercise and drilling of taijiquan pushhand application together with fixed leg competitive pushing hand introduced right from the start. (I think freestyle push hand are too dangerous for beginner).
I know both classes are deviation from the proper taijiquan but I'm thinkng that proper taijiquan practice could be introduced after I get begginer hooked on either aspect of taijiquan first. Have anyone tried this approach. I appreciate any advice.