Limits and Teaching Kids

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Teaching is an art and with younger people often quite challenging. In China Wu Shu can be taught to children as young as four year’s old. The teaching is always very disciplined. harsh and strict. Classes would be from 5 to seven days a week. Students would not be just training for themselves but they would be training to showcase China’s art. You would be training for your country and not for personal glory. On a Youtube video that I saw, they interviewed world famous pianist Valentina Lisitsa and she said the same thing about her piano studies, that she did it for her country and not for her personal glory.

When I was learning Wing Chun from Patrick Chow he said that in Hong Kong they generally wanted Wing Chun students to be more mature and at least 14 years of age. After learning Wing Chun I saw that this art is actually very sophisticated and deep. In the 1950’s most of the Hong Kong students in Wing Chun were not educated academic people who could write about this art compared to those studying Tai Chi so there were no real in depth scholarly works on Wing Chun at that time.

The Hong Kong Wing Chun mentality was to let your hands and not your mouth do the talking. Actually the ideal time they would hit their opponent is in the middle of their talking because then their brains would be occupied with what they wanted to say. So before the bad guy finished his sentence he would already be hit in his mouth.

Once I was invited to a martial arts display at a local high school for grade 7,8 and 9 students. What happens in these events is that crowd mentality takes over and no one is really serious about wanting to learn anything about any art. The students went to the sessions because their teachers told them to go and also it was an escape from their regular boring subjects of study. It is best to not go into these kinds of events with too serious an attitude and to prepare a ready set of smart ass answers. Some of the top questions I was asked by these students were:

Top martial arts questions from grade 7,8 and 9 students

1. Can you beat up Bruce Lee?

2. What would you do if a lion jumped on your back?

3. If you are surrounded by ten people with chain saws then what would you do?

4. How can you fight someone who is bigger , stronger , faster and knows more than you do?

5. If an alligator grabs your leg when you are swimming in the swimming pool, then how would you handle that?

6. If I tied you up with a rope then how would you get out?

7. What if the guy has a machine gun, then what?

8. Is here anything that could defeat that crane kick at the end of the Karate kid movie? They said nothing can defeat that kick!

One thing Wing Chun Master Wang Kiu would say is that we all have limits. He would express that with the saying “You can’t block a motorcycle with a Bong sau!” Master Kenneth Chung would say that if your opponent with similar skills out weights you by 49 pounds then usually that is your limit. My Hung style teacher James Lore told me that for a lady to really be able to beat a guy who can fight, she would need to have ten times his skill because of the physical attribute difference. So a regular ladies self defense course would be better than nothing but in reality would not help too much.

Of course most kids are not like that. If trained the right way, kids of all ages can be taught anything from the earliest age. For the very young kids sometimes a non -structured more fun way to teach will work. On YouTube there are all kinds of very young kids these days who do a very good job of teaching various martial arts.