When I first moved to Shanghai, I spent 4 years working at the College of International Tourism at Shanghai Normal University. Some of my university students from Xinjiang heard I was a fighter and asked if I'd give them lessons. So I brought some gloves and some pads and we worked out for an hour during my break.
I've never seen anyone this excited about training. Ever. It was like watching Christmas morning. I joke you not. They weren't too bad either.
On a seemingly unrelated note, most of these guys speak six different languages. Chinese, Uighur, English, Arabic, Russian, and Kazakh. Oddly, I think they learned more about practical English skills during one hour of fight training yesterday than they have all semester long in their English classes.
That's the problem with language education in schools these days, they try to separate the mind from the body. We're not built to work that way. You can't have one without the other. I wish I could run all the university language classes in the gym instead of in stuffy classrooms at desk with faces buried in poorly written books all day. Language, like any skill, is learned through living- through action, not simply through quiet contemplation.
I've never seen anyone this excited about training. Ever. It was like watching Christmas morning. I joke you not. They weren't too bad either.
On a seemingly unrelated note, most of these guys speak six different languages. Chinese, Uighur, English, Arabic, Russian, and Kazakh. Oddly, I think they learned more about practical English skills during one hour of fight training yesterday than they have all semester long in their English classes.
That's the problem with language education in schools these days, they try to separate the mind from the body. We're not built to work that way. You can't have one without the other. I wish I could run all the university language classes in the gym instead of in stuffy classrooms at desk with faces buried in poorly written books all day. Language, like any skill, is learned through living- through action, not simply through quiet contemplation.