Today we’d like to introduce you to Jing Jing Evans.
Jing Jing, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
Hello, Readers!
My story is really just the follow-up to my mother’s and my husband’s stories.
My mother, Siu-Fong Evans, always really wanted to open a school for kids, but never had the means to. In her mid-life, she finally got to learn Taiji (Tai Chi) while she was accompanying me in Beijing, and more while she earned a master’s degree in Chinese Literature in San Francisco. When she came back to San Diego, she realized that no one else in San Diego did Taiji like she did – so she started teaching Taiji herself. Which led to her opening a Chinese Martial Arts School with Taiji and Wushu (kung fu).
I learned Taiji from my mother, of course, and when she opened the school, I helped teach and do anything else that had to be done — sign up students, take tuition, do inventory, cleaning, whatever.
I met my husband Chris Mendoza at one of the martial arts tournaments that we went to so frequently in the early years of our school. Conveniently, he was an advanced athlete in Wushu and he was finishing his MBA — finally, someone with some formal business training! Within a few years, we were married and he was helping me run the school.
They have since moved on to other things, but I still help teach and sign up students and do inventory and cleaning and everything else that has to be done.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Everything is relative, yes? I feel like we’ve never had any enormous challenges, but we have had twists and turns; times when we felt flush and times when we were worried if we could stay in business, or if we even should stay in business.
I’ve been lucky that my husband has weathered the biggest waves for me – finding new locations, negotiating leases, figuring out how to stay operational.
For me, personally, the biggest jump was when my husband told me “We have to start a kids’ after-school program.”
Until then, I knew nothing about kids besides what my own three-year-old needed. I’d never babysat. I’d never volunteered with kids’ groups. I didn’t even teach the kids’ wushu classes at our own school.
But I recognized that if we wanted to stay in business, it had to be done. So we brought on Mrs. Laura – someone who had taught kindergarten and knew a lot about kids – buckled down, and started a kids’ program.
Besides raising my own kids, our JING Kids’ After-School program is the most rewarding thing I’ve ever had the pleasure of being a part of.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about JING Institute, LLC, dba JING Institute of Chinese Martial Arts & Culture, dba JING Kids Chinese After-School Program?
The martial arts that we teach are Wushu (like you see in every Kungfu movie) and Taiji (a slow, thoughtful, highly purposeful martial arts demanding great balance and coordination and intent).
For adults, we teach Wushu and Taiji. Our adult clients are interested in health and fun and self-development, so we have a grand time teaching fun new things and revisiting complicated old things for the purpose of self-improvement, on our clients’ schedule. We can move as fast or as slow as our clients want; and, since we are all working adults, we tend to move slowly, but inexorably forward. It’s great to be able to improve at our own pace, doing what we want, rather than to be beholden to a competition schedule or compulsory routines. We are certified by the US Wushu Kungfu Federation, but we teach at the pleasure of our students.
For kids, we have two programs: Wushu only, and our full After-School Program. The kids all take Wushu together, but our After-School kids also learn Chinese Language and Chinese Culture and get homework help and some do STEM classes and we are responsible for picking them up after school and keeping them safe and educating them in every way – physically, intellectually, emotionally, and socially – until their parents pick them up. It’s a big job, and there are a lot of us here to do it.
We have been developing every one of our curricula since we first started teaching kids here in Scripps Ranch in 2011. For Chinese language: seeing as how most Chinese-for-kids curricula are made for heritage kids (kids who have at least one family member speaking Chinese at home) or kids in Chinese-immersion school, it wasn’t long before I started making my own materials for Chinese, specific for our own students. I update my goals and curricula for each Chinese class every year, depending on the specific makeup of our students and how successful I felt the previous school-year to be. It’s a constant challenge, but one that I really enjoy.
Now, all of our youngest learners have an easy, fun curriculum that that teaches little kids to read and write Chinese characters and sing Chinese songs and poems before they even know their abc’s. We don’t require the little ones to learn a lot, but we want them to learn very deeply.
Our older learners, after they have mastered some foundational vocabulary, are split into two groups – heritage speakers (and kids who have learned enough to understand conversational Chinese) and non-heritage speakers.
For the heritage speakers, we can run Chinese-only (no English) classes and teach them on a more rigorous spiral-up curriculum because they already intuitively know a lot of Chinese – we are just reminding them of sentence structures and teaching them how to read and un-ambiguating homophones. We can give them more challenging songs and poems and games, too, which is great fun.
For non-heritage speakers, we know that they are busy and their families are busy and no one at home will be able to reinforce our Chinese lessons, so we give them the tools to learn independently, then expose them to as much fun Chinese as possible – pop songs with colloquial lyrics, silly videos of everyday situations, gripping animated movies with reasonable speaking speeds. They sing and read and write and talk and act out funny scenes, and we review our basic vocabulary constantly, but we don’t pressure them to remember some grammatical helper word that they learned 3 months ago. Class is focused on using Chinese in a fun way, of getting both feet firmly through the door of “Chinese Language” and opening up a whole new world.
We have a great Wushu instructor, too, who understands how limited the kids’ time is, and how to set goals and structure classes to fit the limited time and diverse student base. We have two primary goals in Wushu: let the kids enjoy learning, and make sure that they are improving with every class. They don’t all have to improve at the same rate or in the same way, but they should be stronger and more flexible and more coordinated and more aware of how their body works at the end of each day than at the beginning. We do something new every year and Mr. Shaun incorporates lots of games and competitions to keep the kids excited and engaged, and we have a Performance Team for kids who want more opportunities to learn and share the fruits of their hard work.
AND!!
I teach Culture Classes during the school year, and during Spring and Summer Camps, we do lots of culturally-inspired arts and crafts. I really love this part of our school because I somehow grew up with only a very vague knowledge of my mother’s culture, and absolutely no arts or crafts at all (my mom sadly admits that she can’t draw and she can’t craft; the only thing she can do is calligraphy and poetry); but my own kids, and all the kids we teach, now know much more than I did at their age, and have many more skills and much more confidence than I ever had.
During the school year, we teach the kids short lessons about Chinese history, Chinese cultural practices, inventions that are difficult to make activities out of (like lacquerware, or gunpowder), and how kids live in modern-day China. It’s great fun, opening their eyes to the greater world, though it always takes me much longer to prepare for these little classes than I anticipate because I always end up doing crazy deep dives (Ask me anything about pandas. Or Journey to the West. Or the TaoTie motif on ancient bronzes :).
During Spring and Summer Camps, we focus on Chinese Arts & Crafts that we can practice and build skills in, like origami and knots (tying bracelets and charms) and calligraphy and watercolor painting. My favorite thing is when the kids extend their skills beyond my original lesson, so when another student comes up asking for help on something advanced, I can point to the over-achiever and say “Go ask that student. They know more than me now.”
Alright, so to wrap up, is there anything else you’d like to share with us?
I feel like there aren’t many opportunities for kids to play across grades, but our after-school kids get to play and develop deep friendships regardless of age.
While all of our kids are separated by age and level for their classes, they all play together during free time, TK – 8th grade. It’s really heartwarming to watch the bigger kids play with the little ones — sometimes a little sibling will find that all of his big brother’s friends want to be his big brother, too; or an origami circle forms with older kids helping younger kids; or kids spontaneously start a game of dodgeball, completely ignoring the fact that some players are literally twice the size of their teammates. I love watching the care and the joy that the kids show for each other.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.JINGinstitute.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JINGInstitute
- Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/JINGInstitute
Image Credits
All photos by Jing Jing & Friends.
