The Importance of Exercise

Translated…

I’d gone back to the university in the U.S. to work as an interviewing scholar this year, other than my set research plans, I’d gotten connected with my friends from my schooling days, everybody’s children are in middle school now.

The Asian parents’ conversation topics all circled around which school district is the best, and the various musical competitions their kids were involved in: piano, violin, along with what sports their children are playing; because the U.S. places an emphasis in the sports, although most of these Asian kids managed to get into the schools’ teams, the parents still do all that they can, to get their children a place in the local community’s sports teams, to give them that advantage when they applied for universities in the future, the adults, as well as the children, all had full schedules. This sort of busyness, is too familiar to me, the parents in Taiwan are also rushing like this, it’s just, that they’re, hurrying, taking their children, to the various cram schools.

All the parents in the world want their children to succeed, as for, how success is defined, it’s usually, based off of the mainstream beliefs.

this, is what’s going on, in an Asian country’s classrooms…

In the U.S., an outstanding child not only needed to have excellent scholastic performances, s/he would need to be talented, and s/he would need to play a sport too; the parents who’d just asked their young to make the perfect scores on their exams, after immigranting to the U.S., demanded that their children spend time on sports, and competitions too.

A lot of people are criticizing the Taiwanese parents’ belief of training their young into becoming doctors, that is because our main stream values focuses solely on, making that perfect score; the red banners with the names of those who’d scored a perfect score after the entrance exams for high school, for colleges, and the newspapers’ reports of who scored a perfect score on the college entrance exams, and those placements that were started, way back in the early elementary years, to the middle, and high school levels as well; the parents in the middle class probably, arrived at where they are, gotten what they’d paid, by working like this, and, naturally, nobody wanted, to stray from the mainstream values.

and here’s the goings on, of an American/European classroom…

not my photo still…

The child of my Asian friend told me, that midle school in the U.S. is not at all easy, you’d needed to make good grades, and be active too, that student life, is very busy, sometimes, they’d lacked the time to sleep too. But, seeing their more fitted figures (especially in the girls), comparing to the teens of their age group, I’d thought, that their hard work, had yielded, a higher return. A lot of research studies had, pointed out the positive relationship between health and exercises, that it can, add to the abilities to learn for students, and, the values of our society, surely, isn’t, healthy enough, the teenagers would need a lot of exercises, to grow taller, but they were made to sit, from morning until night, and, at the same time, the society demanded that the elderly population who are no longer as mobile, to work out more.

Everybody says, that being healthy is priceless, but we’d often seen, how the schools slashed the fundings for physical education courses, in exchange for the extra academic courses that would help the students make higher grades, we, are at, a loss here.

So, although, there’s this consensus of how you not only need to study hard, you’d also need to, go out to exercise more when you’re growing up, but the system of education here in Asian countries still put too much emphasis on grades, and naturally, they’d slashed the funding for the less-needed courses like P.E., music, art, etc., etc., etc., which is why, you’d rarely seen, any Asian kids playing in sports in the U.S., because the parents in the U.S. cared about the complete and total development and wellbeing, as well as health, of their young, while the parents here still held tightly, to the values of making the grades is the most important thing in a student’s life.