was asked to do lion dance for chinese new year’s and he said no, what would you do?
Nothing. :rolleyes:
that’s like, Give me $10…
well couldn’t you ask to do it instead if you were that interested besides it is his/her decision after all.
get rid of him. Any student that is too selfish to support his Sifu or Si-Hings will spread his attitude like a cancer throughout your school. It may seem trivial, but it is an attitude, and it will manifest on other levels in time.
Before “getting rid of him”, I think it might be useful to talk to him and determine why he didn’t want to do it. There are a lot of possible reasons, some of which are not selfish.
hy
whats is important about lion dance? i relly dont know
[QUOTE=TenTigers;929090]get rid of him. Any student that is too selfish to support his Sifu or Si-Hings will spread his attitude like a cancer throughout your school. It may seem trivial, but it is an attitude, and it will manifest on other levels in time.[/QUOTE]
Agreed…
[QUOTE=bawang;929098]hy
whats is important about lion dance? i relly dont know[/QUOTE]
LOL same here.
perhaps, it is a Guangdong regional thing
[QUOTE=Shaolin Dude;929085]was asked to do lion dance for chinese new year’s and he said no, what would you do?[/QUOTE]
I would remind myself, if I were the sifu of a school that is open to the public and accepts paying students, that this student is a customer who pays for a service your school provides to him and that, absent some kind of pre-existing agreement or understanding about the obligation of lion dancing, nothing should be done. Free world. You want all your students to lion dance, put it in the terms of the contract.
"Hey, I know you’re paying me already to learn here but would you mind taking a day away from your family with no compensation to work hard all day.
If you’re lucky they might explode some firecrackers on you, hurt your ears, cause a respiratory breakdown and the best part is that a gang fight might break out if we cross another lion so be sure to bring some weapons
hey, wait! come back! come back!"
I’ve never done a lion dance before. If I was asked to, I’d say no because I have no interest in ever doing it. There shouldn’t be any kind of reprecussions. It’s like asking your neighbor ‘do you want to help me fix my car?’
[QUOTE=lkfmdc;929123]"Hey, I know you’re paying me already to learn here but would you mind taking a day away from your family with no compensation to work hard all day.
If you’re lucky they might explode some firecrackers on you, hurt your ears, cause a respiratory breakdown and the best part is that a gang fight might break out if we cross another lion so be sure to bring some weapons
hey, wait! come back! come back!"[/QUOTE]
Where’s the problem? Sounds like the good ol’ days to me… :D:eek:
[QUOTE=Old Noob;929120]I would remind myself, if I were the sifu of a school that is open to the public and accepts paying students, that this student is a customer who pays for a service your school provides to him and that, absent some kind of pre-existing agreement or understanding about the obligation of lion dancing, nothing should be done. Free world. You want all your students to lion dance, put it in the terms of the contract.[/QUOTE]
I agree completely.
It’s this ‘old school’ mentality that some of you have that keep you in the past. If you want to create compelling futures for yourselves, have the courage to leave the past where it belongs…in the past.
Or, cut your students off because they decide not to play any ‘lion dance games.’
You guys are silly. Are you a lion dance school? Did you agree before hand that you would require this of your students? Are you insulted because it’s a tradition that YOU care about and they don’t? Gimme a break you guys…
My sifu just paid us to dance out the money he received. If you danced, you got paid. If not…
This was on top of the food & drink he bought for us out of his pocket.
No big deal.
Find someone else to do the dance if you wanna dance.
Personally, I do not wish to put on performances. My reasons for training do not include performing for others- and besides which, I have stage fright.
If it were part of a religious ritual/observance of some sort, I might agree to to do it. That’s a somewhat different role from that of an entertainer, or of showing off in order to try to draw in new students. Also, if it seemed like something that was really important to my teacher, I might agree to do it out of respect for him/her. But I wouldn’t be happy about it. (When I studied ballet, I skipped the recitals, too).
Another reason this hypothetical person might be balking is that he isn’t confident about his competance at the task.
[QUOTE=sean_stonehart;929125]Where’s the problem? Sounds like the good ol’ days to me… :D:eek:[/QUOTE]
tru dat
man, i really miss it sometimes…
on a side note, okinawan eisa drumming has a very similar vibe - without the whole lion rivalry thing tho.
there are other ways a student can help if they have performance anxieties. They can help with the door when the Lion enters and leaves, they can do fireworks, they can be a “runner,” which is someone who can communicate to the lions in case of a problem.
We are open to the public, but the “service” we provide is a Traditional School, with all the “trappings,”* excellent instruction, personal attention to our students, exciting, motivating classes, and sweat.
- We’ve gone there before, you don’t have to agree with me. I’m sure McDonalds jeers at Burger King for his insistance on flame broiling his burgers. People who want it their way, will go to one place, and people who are looking for something else will go to the other.
just bearing in mind that, while for the Chinese, the whole kung-fu school as familial relation thing was a highly functional construct in context of the culture: it demarcated and solidified relationships that were important for little things like livelihood and survival; as such, doing Lion Dancing was a way of enforcing those bonds, not to mention an important source of income: do you think that rival schools got into fights because one thought that the other’s lion was prettier?
to superimpose that mentality onto modern-day US culture is silly: Mike, Dave and myself know exactly what that means, vis-a-vis the looks of complete befuddlement on the faces of the suburbanites who accompanied us on our first (and LAST) Chinatown Lion Dance debacle (~'92?), when we had a little “issue” with one of the local “youth enrichment associations”, all because of the BS mentality surrounding the whole affair;
personally, if you want to involve your students in an activity that has nothing to do with why they signed up at your school in the first place, you may need to rethink some priorities, especially if it’s an activity that could put them at risk; of course, if LD is advertised and if a student’s involvement is part of the curriculum, that’s cool, as long as they know that before they sign up
Second Old Noob.
One has to consider, when coming from a culture that has more Confucian influenced observance of special occasions, and teaching in a culture that does not share the same, some negotiation is required on both sides. Students do not necessarily come with a knowledge of what, in China, is considered good manners, just as some manners here would be unknown to some newcomers.
Simply imposing Confucian requirements, and drawing Confucian conclusions, when most of the people involved do not share that influence, ends badly. Not just because of the number of disagreements that occur, but because, unlike China, here, when a teacher takes their orthodoxy too far, there is not as strong a chance that friends will intercede and say “Sir, you’re being unreasonable”.
IF a kung fu teacher is going to enforce Confucian mores on non-Confucians, he must have the knowledge of it to teach it, if that’s his choice.
The list of reading required to do this fairly is daunting, but it is unfair to impose a culture on others that one has only a common citizen’s knowledge of. People in imperial China spent whole lifetimes studying this topic just to get the chance to get a job, often never really succeeding.
I know of a few scholars, Chinese academics whose area of expertise is Confucianism. One actually is largely Confucian in view. He lives a life of much greater pressure from fulfilling his ideals than any kung fu teacher in America, because in China, if you screw up, everyone around you knows everything. In a kung fu school here, you often have a Chinese teacher who goes out with his or her students, but otherwise is surrounded by other Chinese, who often have little contact with those students, so you get teachers enforcing, but not capable of adequately explaining, Confucian mores, to non-Confucians, who have rarely been asked whether they wish to live in a Confucian way, who don’t know that the way the Chinese seem to deal with this is everybody gets to know everything, and the people who most capable of interceding, other Chinese, often don’t know anything about it.