The Modern Southern Shaolin Temple

[kungfudork]

GLW,
wow....do i know you? i just noticed that you are here in houston. you know about the dallas competition. i was there too. as far as the duties thing, i don't think it was brought on by either of the monks personally.....but a member of one party complained and made a big deal out of it.....so, jimmy wong handled it quite professionally and decided if there was any possibility of a problem, then both sides will step down from their duties. smart.

i agree that calling a student stupid seems insulting and could have been, but i have also found that the limited english vocabulary these monks have lends them to saying things differently. you have to be around them enough to really understand the thinking behind some of the english words.

i hope this is the case here, so maybe you can ease your feelings. i visited shaolin temple for a month in 1996 and i was shocked to see how cruel the teachers seemed to be to the students. yelling at the students, sometimes popping them in the legs with a small stick. they really dig down and push the students, but i feel now that this is the way they help the student find their full potential. it is really unorthodox, but let me tell you what changed my mind. i was watching some kids train near the tagou school down the street from shaolin temple. they were between the ages of probably 8-14. the were practicing forms i think, and one kid kept getting it wrong. the coach yelled at him and he just kind of laughed it off. he did it wrong again, this time he recieved a swift hit with a stick....i was shocked, it really caught me off guard. the kid still kind of laughed it off. he did it wrong once more...this time the coach told him to come over and sit down, stop training. the kid went into a fit, he was screaming and crying and begging to please keep training. this opened up a whole new world to me. these kids were willing to get beat a little, yelled at all day and that was fine, but if you told them they couldn't train...it was like you were killing them.

i guess my point was, or was supposed to be, that the monks in houston haven't been in the US that long and they still have the mindset of training the way they were trained. they have come a long way already. i visited them here in 1999 and watched a few classes, they were very strict and hard on the students. i think that is why they only had chinese students....any non-chinese would have walked in and thought these guys were crazy teaching like this. i can speak for my teacher, he is learning the way of the west. he thinks it is funny that here you must tell the kid they are doing good and to keep trying even if they haven't got a clue about what they are doing. good old US posotive re-enforcement theory is what i like to call it. i don't know if i think it really works. i mean if you are told you are doing good all the time, why would you ever want to try harder and improve....you think you are doing just fine. that is why the skill level of the US compared to the Chinese at this point in history is so different....they use "negative re-enforcement" to make the student reach their full potential and maybe even then some. i guess both methods have posotives and negatives.

well once again i have rambled on and on. hey GLW if you want to talk more or even visit the school you can send me an email. go to my webpage and there is a link there for "contact".
i am currently training with Shi Xing Hao. Our school is Shaolin Kung Fu Academy and we are located inside the Chinese Civic Center.

respect to all! again, sorry for the ramble.

thanks,
dieter