The Yiquan Academy, day 6
22 07 2008Another washout. Got to the school, no-one there. Another morning wasted. That’s time I could have spent preparing for next semester, or drumming up freelance work.
Oh well. To adapt the saying that became famous when Dubya got it wrong, “Waste my time once, shame on you; waste my time twice, shame on me”. Guess I’ll have to start calling ahead to see if there will be class.
OK, I just gave him a call. Sounds like he wasn’t at the school. Anyway, it seems there’s no class tomorrow morning either, but there is in the afternoon.
Not sounding good Emlyn.
Rushing through the curriculum - could result in poor quality control which is no good for you or their rep. Not have the pressence of mind to inform their only foriegn student of cancelled sessions - inconsiderate.
If they charge based on the amount of stuffs learned no wonder they try to push you faster than you want to go. Some people may be happy but again quality is an issue.
I am surprised…..
Hmm - might be a good idea to invest in a nice set of lockpicks then!
(It does suck to waste a lot of time that way.)
@Ed: so, you’re suggesting I break into the wuguan of an reputed martial arts master???? Wait, I think I see a problem with that idea…
@Carlos: well, I’m not best chuffed, but who knows, maybe something was said and I just didn’t get it because of my lousy Mandarin… I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt on this issue, and do the month as planned. Based on that, I’ll let you know my impressions when we meet up in Singapore! I already know that I want to carry on with yiquan, no doubt about that.
Apart from charging for amount of material learned, fast tempo is even in bigger degree result of methodology (there are actual cases of people who couldn’t pay in some periods and where taught the same amount of material in short time) - the idea is that you should get the overall idea of the whole training system as soon as possible, so you can better understand it and practice more conciously. This is not about first perfecting small part without understanding what is the place of this part in the whole, but first getting some rough sketch of the whole, and then perfecting any element in relation to all other elements, better understanding what is more and what is less important.
Hi Dacheng, thanks for your comment!
By the way, am I correct in assuming that you are Andrei, of the European Yiquan Academy?
What you say kind of fits in with what Tabbycat said last year - that there’s only one set of movements, but students go through them repeatedly with different intentions (health first, application next, etc).
I’ll think about this a bit more, and include it in a future blog post. Please do keep reading and commenting - as I mentioned in a previous comment, the fact that my Mandarin is very poor doesn’t help! It’ll be useful for myself and the other people following this to get contributions in English from you.
As usual, as in most situations, it seems our grumbling is actually just a simple case of lack of or mis communication and nothing to do with being ripped off etc. Good comms always, in my experience, results in good feelings and prevents people getting the “hump” or pissed at someone who inturn can not understand why!
But that’s life eh?