Retired Grand -Master

I have been teaching nine years short of my whole life as I draw near seventy years of age. Most of the time it has been a rewarding experience helping others learn the Arts. But I wish to tell those going into teaching to beware because teaching does have drawbacks like anything else in life.

Some of the draw backs are; if you teach in the traditional ways you will never become rich by your efforts to help others. It is something you do out of love in spreading the Arts to others and keeping the old traditions alive for future generations.

Another failing is dealing with people, as I have said many times, much of not all of our troubles in life come from people not living life. If there were no people in the world you would simply be born and die without much trouble. It is dealing with people that brings most of not all of our problems. I have often said a Teacher is like a candle with consumes itself shedding light to others. In other words we simply burn out giving our full efforts to teach others. Often this effort goes un-rewarded other then your own self satisfaction that your doing the right thing for the Art which we love so dearly.

There are many heartbreaks a Teacher deals with, in striving to create a teacher that will carry on the traditions to others. More often then not students fall short of your expectations, and seeing it can take up to ten years to create a young new Teacher we don't have the life span to create very many. So if your choice is a bad one on who we focus on, and we are wrong, then years of your life have been wasted. We have only so much time in the world and a Master is lucky if he or she can create but a handful of new Teachers to carry on.

This is why you will notice any great Master in history only has but a few he managed to train successfully to carry on. I managed to create five Master levels in my entire life and one young Shrfu level. Of course you may find others who claim they have created many Teachers, but the question is how good are they really? In fact, quality Teachers not to mention Masters are indeed hard to find. The proof of this statement can be seen just by looking who is teaching these days. If you look you will easily see the difference between quality teachers and the average run of the mill teachers today.

So what is the good part of Teaching? This answer is simply, the few you do create make everything else worthwhile. You then can retire knowing you have created a quality Teacher that will carry on the Art. One good Teacher or Master can teach thousands of others in their lifetime. This will ensure they to will find the select few who are worthy enough to be called Shrfu or better yet Master. I have done this so with all the hardships I have endured I accept knowing I did my part in safeguarding this Art for those who are sincere enough to learn it.