Jumping

I like to tease one of my students a lot.

He is 11 but quite tall. His father, I mentioned him in my last post, told me that his son has a black belt in Tae Kwon Do and in Gum-Do.

When I was younger I tried lots of martial arts, and I am lazy to put links to them all. I also liked doing acrobatics of all sorts and yoga and running and walking a lot and skating long distances as fast as possible and well you get the bloody idea.

I can still do a few of my old tricks. I do not practice much anymore, I'd like to resume some of it in the near future though, it's fun.

So I like to see, because he has 2 black belts according to his father, what this student can do.

I first tried to get him to do bouncing ball push ups. After that I tried to see if he can do a kip-up. Then, I tried to see if he can sit on the floor with his legs straight out front and push his body up, keeping his legs stiff and straight, off the ground. I do not know what that's called maybe I'll get Siew to take a picture of me doing it and post it.

I spent a lot of time doing crazy or stupid stuff like that when I was young. I taught myself how to do cartwheels when I was 7. I learned more later, mostly on my own.

For me these kinds of things are common. Apparently, even for a double black belt holder, they are not.

In a class with this student we were reading about some firefighters who were inside of one of the World Trade Centers when it collapsed on September 11, 2001.

One lady in the story had descended 59 flights of stairs and was exhausted. I asked them if they thought they could go so many stairs without getting tired. Of course they couldn't, but they had joked about it, hence the question.

I then, because of the one student, said that even if I go down the fastest way I can I'd still be really tired. I said that I can descend a set of stairs all at once. They didn't believe me.

After class, when I was leaving, I warned the kids, "If I show you, you can NEVER try to copy me." They happened to be standing at the door when I was going out, and no adults were watching. So I showed them.

For most normal flights of stairs, if you fall forward, grab the handrail midway down and let your feet swing forward it is easy to descend in a "jump." It was harder here because there is only 1 rail. I put my hand on the wall on the left to hold myself as though it was a rail.

The boys shouted when they saw me do that. They didn't believe me, but I don't lie to my students.

I talked with Siew about it later. She said that it's uncommon here, people focus more on studying.

Thinking back on it, not many people I know can do those things either. Those who can, can't do it as well as I can for the most part.

I trained myself a lot, because I thought it was fun. Now there are things like Parkour that I would have LOVED to do when I was younger, and still wouldn't mind but my knees wouldn't last.