Part One: Curriculum
For the last seven years, I have taught martial arts part-time in southern California. I started in March of 2011 in my garage. When I built up enough students, I moved into a light industrial space in a nearby city. I was only teaching three days a week, but I had a toddler, an infant, a career as a high school teacher, and a wife who really wanted me to live my dream, but who needed me home more than I was at the time to be with our young family. After a year, the lease expired on the light industrial space, and I moved my practice back into my garage. Most of my students moved back with me. Classes resumed in my garage; I did not go bankrupt, and picked up almost five hundred hours of teaching experience in a year.
A few months before I started teaching in my garage in 2011, I wrote a curriculum. My original curriculum had four phases, and led to eligibility for Apprentice, Associate, and Full Instructor Certification. When I came into the Jun Fan Arts, my instructor was Sifu/Guro Bud Thompson, one of Sifu/Guro Inosanto’s “old school” Full Instructors. At Sifu Bud’s academy, the entire curriculum was organized into phases, and all of the phases were available as handouts for students at any time. There were no rank requirements to be able to access the handouts; shortly after I joined, I had the entire curriculum organized in a three-ring binder, and I took notes religiously on those handouts over time because that is how I learn best. Occasionally, Sifu Bud would make minor changes to the curriculum and I would move my older versions to the back of my binder when the new versions went up front.
When I wrote my own curriculum a few months before my classes started in my garage in 2011, what I wrote was heavily influenced by what was modeled for me by Sifu Bud. My original curriculum had Jeet Kune Do, Inosanto/La Coste, Maphilindo Silat, Thai Boxing, Wing Chun, Savate, Dog Brothers, and mixed grappling requirements at every phase At that time, I wanted to start teaching, and not get into arguments, so I just called the material originating with Bruce Lee and being passed to Dan Inosanto “Jeet Kune Do”. I did not go into great detail about what JKD was and was not, nor did I even use the term “Jun Fan Gung Fu” in my practice at the time. JKD was simply one of the headings of requisite material my students were responsible for demonstrating at each level.
That original curriculum took me all through way to the Fall of 2012, from my garage to my first academy space and back to my garage. Only two changes were necessary during that year and a half: first, I wrote my first curriculum for children, and second, early after starting classes in my garage, I had my first student who told me heonly wanted to learn the Filipino Martial Arts from me. After a little bit of reflection, I decided that if the original graduates of Sifu Inosanto’s first commercial school, The Kali Academy, received separate credentials in JKD and the FMA’s, that was a fine model for my practice. I wrote my my first FMA Curriculum, and took everything else and put it into what I called “The Empty-Handed Blend”. The Empty-Handed Blend had Jeet Kune Do, Maphilindo Silat, Thai Boxing, Wing Chun, Savate, and mixed grappling requirements at every phase. Again, I am sharing the decision I made at the time about the wordage that seemed appropriate. I am not trying to redefine JKD or Jun Fan Gung Fu, or differentiate styles from philosophies. The Empty-Handed Blend had four phases, and it took about three years to complete the first three phases, at which time one would become eligible to test for Apprentice Instructor, which required the candidate to teach a full Empty- Handed Blend Class and receive feedback from me (today, candidates must teach three classes over a few weeks with feedback coming from me after the first and second classes).
The Empty-Handed Blend became “Jeet Kune Do” in 2014.
At that time, I wrote a separate Silat and Thai Boxing Curriculum, so the required arts at each phase became “Non-Classical Gung Fu” (I was avoiding “Jun Fan” as a term at that time because of copyright concerns), Savate, and mixed grappling. The phase/instructorship requirements remained the same. In all honesty, teaching part time and representing all of the systems and instructors I want to represent has always been tough. I never actively said that Savate was part of JKD (I did share that Lee liked the way Savateuers boxed with their feet), but if I’m being transparent, I really didn’t have anywhere else to put Savate in my weekly schedule at that time.
Around that time, my Wing Chun Instructor, Sifu Francis Fong, wrote a Wing Chun curriculum. Up until that point, Sifu had allowed the people he certified to write their own curriculums. I took what I had written up prior to that as “Wing Chun”, and re-named it “JKD Trapping”. I had created a training progression for trapping that had been very successful for my students. I taught seven basic trapping combinations from a high reference point, and at every subsequent level, taught entries to those seven basics. Today, I have seven entries throughout my curriculum, so seven entries times seven basics is forty-nine techniques. Then there are two leads, so we have have ninety-eight techniques. Then we can throw training modifiers (a Sayoc Term) in the mix, such as boxing gloves, and we have one hundred ninety-six techniques, and so on. All of that is based on seven basics that are present at all times in the progression, and I can help my students avoid knowing hundreds of trapping combinations that can only be pulled off from a high reference point.That incarnation of the curriculum remained until late 2016. At that point, I moved to my current curriculum. In my current curriculum, there are seven levels of Jun Fan Gung Fu. Earning required levels in the style of Jun Fan qualifies candidates to test toearn phase certification in the process and philosophy of Jeet Kune Do. For example, students must have completed Jun Fan Levels One and Two to be eligible to test JKD Phase One.My Jun Fan Levels have the set techniques required at each level. The JKD tests are more about sparring, performance, research, and bringing in answers each candidate discovered in his/her own preparation for the examination. I am pleased with the current version of my curriculum, and my students seem to be as well. However, they know that I reserve the right to make changes at any time based on their needs, or my need to update the curriculum based on my own growth and development.
I earned my Jun Fan/JKD Instructorship from Sifu Inosanto in 2008. The last decade has been filled with learning. With no ego, I am a far better instructor now than I was in 2011, and frankly, there would be a problem if I were not. My instructors, colleagues, and students have all brought about meaningful changes in my martial arts DNA. If I don’t pass the benefits of those meaningful changes onto my students, than I am not embracing the JKD spirit. My teaching journey from 2011 until now has equipped me with the tools necessary and forged me into the person I am, able to write my current curriculum. That is not just the JKD spirit, it is JKD.