Kung Fu Conversations Podcast

A reminder for students enrolled in our programs:

If you hope to be cleared to teach within our organization at some point, you will need to study Teaching 101 in depth.

Technical skill and practitioner rank are important, but the ability to perform material does not automatically establish the ability to teach it safely, progressively, and effectively. Teaching requires a separate body of knowledge, including curriculum design, lesson planning, objective assessment, progressive skill development, and an understanding of how different students learn.

For that reason, passing a course covering the contents of Teaching 101 will be required before practitioner grades can be converted into teaching grades.

Learn the art, develop the skill, then learn how to pass it on responsibly.

When you take a broad view of history, or simply remain involved in something long enough, you begin to notice the pendulum swinging from one extreme to another.

Martial arts are no exception.

At one stage, practitioners accumulate forms, drills, methods, terminology, and technical variations. Over time, as their understanding deepens, they begin to recognize the common principles beneath all that material; what once seemed vast and complicated is gradually distilled into something simpler, more direct, and more essential.

Then those practitioners become teachers.

They soon discover that the distilled understanding they have developed cannot always be handed directly to a less experienced student. What has become implicit, intuitive, and embodied within the teacher must often be made explicit again for the student.

The curriculum expands once more, not necessarily because the teacher has lost sight of the essence, but because students need examples, drills, distinctions, and progressive experiences before they can discover that essence for themselves.

This may be a natural cycle of learning: first we eat by accumulating information, then we digest by organizing and distilling it.

The challenge is that the teacher and the student are usually at different points in that cycle. The teacher wants to communicate the distilled lesson, while the student may still need the larger body of material from which that lesson was derived.