Kung Fu Fighting!

I'm not sure if I've mentinned this before, but I've started learning my second martial art: Wushu!
Wushu is basically a modernized version of Kung Fu.  I'd say more, but since I've only just started learning it, I'm not that comfortable with my knowledge of it.  Anyway, one of my TKD students has been practicing Wushu for years, since before learning TKD.  The other black belts and I had talked to him to see if he would be allowed/interested to teach some Wushu to the class (since we lost our home school awhile back and are therefore an "unofficial" TKD school, we decided we might as well take advantage of our situation and teach things that you wouldn't normally teach in a formal TKD school).  Anyway, he talked to his Sifu (teacher; see-foo), who gave him permission to teach us.  It was a lot of fun.  It moves very differently than TKD, and it's been a little awkward to learn so far, but I'd like to think I'm picking it up pretty well.

Here's the first form I'm learning.  My student (or teacher in this case lol) taught it a little different.  I looked through a few videos of it on youtube, and this one is the closest I could find to the way he teaches it.

Anyway, that resting stance she does? Where she's basically sitting? Yeah, that was a bitch to learn it's really awkward and hurts your knees at first.  Now that I can do it pretty well, it's kindof fun.  I like to impress people by randomly falling into it lol.
That sweeping arm movement towards the end was also really awkward to learn.  I'm learning my second form now, which I can't find a video of, mostly because my student/teacher doesn't really bother telling us the names of these forms.  He has such little confidence in his pronunciation skills with these Chinese names, that he's afraid he'll accidentally say them completely wrong.

When he teaches, I've tried calling him Sifu, but he hates it when I call him that.  He says that it's not inappropriate to call him that, he just feels weird being called that name since all of his Sifus are much older and way more experienced than him.

I really want to go to a real Wushu school.  My teacher tells me that there's a lot of stuff that he's not allowed to teach, and that you have to go to an actual school in order to learn it

My students

At TKD practice this week, our students have been going through pre-testing. Every once in a while, we hold a promotion test where students can earn their next belt rank. At this test, the head of our TKD home school (the TKD program offered at my college is a branch of this man's program) comes down to run everyone's test. Before any of our students can actually test though, my co-instructor and I have to approve them by making sure they know all of the material by having them run through it. That's what pre-testing is. Testing always makes me think back on how far each of my students have come. They really have no idea how proud I am of them. You see all kinds of kids come into TKD. The ones who I'm most proud of are the ones who find some way of bettering themselves through the program. I see angry people come in and watch them slowly learn how to control their tempers. I watch shy kids slowly become more confident and come out of their boxes.

One student, I'll call her Lisa, started coming to class when her friend dragged her along. She used to be extremely depended on her friends for motivation. Now, she's become very strong, independent, confident and no longer needs anyone as a crutch; she now comes to class on her own, even though her friend is now studying abroad and doesn't come to class with her anymore.

I think the student who I'm most proud of is that guy that I'll call Tommy. TKD is something that just does not come natural to Tommy. When he came in, he was single-handedly the most awkward student I've ever seen. However, his mentality in class is the best I've ever seen. He's kind and respectful to everyone in class, he listens to advice, he's willing to try new things all the time, and he's not afraid to give everything his all. He perseveres more than anyone I've seen. He still struggles whenever he has new techniques to learn, but he's one of the better students when it comes to the techniques that he's already learned.

I probably sound like a broken record at this point, but I felt the need to express how much I care about these kids. (I call them kids, but really they're all around my age)