“Karate Man”

By Allison Gorman

Photo by Michelle Young

Ready for a challenge: Corey Green (center), owner of Green’s Karate, estimates that he’s taught 24,000 karate classes, from in-studio lessons to on-site programs at schools and daycare centers. Here Green leads a beginners’ class at the JA Henry Eastgate YMCA. Participating are, left to right, Alex Davidson, 11, Christopher Chubbock, 8, Tiana Lloyd, 9, Green, Brady Saffles, 8, Katy Dietsche, 9, and James Bowman, 26.

Here’s an interesting social experiment:
Take a shy 7-year-old boy and put him in a tiny town in the Alaskan wilderness. Give him three older brothers at home, the usual quota of bullies at school, and a middle name that has unfortunate rhyming possibilities. Then take him to see the new summer blockbuster, The Karate Kid.
In Corey Green’s case, those circumstances reached their natural conclusion when he watched Mr. Miyagi “wax on, wax off,” then announced to his mother, “When I grow up, I’m going to be a karate man.” He was good for his word. Now trained in nine martial arts styles and owner of Green’s Karate on Access Road, Green has practiced or taught karate ever since.
Early on, he learned he has a knack for teaching kids who face challenges in life, as he once did. As an 18-year-old teacher-in-training, he was assigned a special student, Octavian—a 6-year-old Bosnian boy who had lost an arm, a leg and a hip in a bomb blast. After four months of training with Green, Octavian had earned his yellow belt.
Thirteen years later, parents still seek out Green out to teach their children with special needs, from cerebral palsy to Down syndrome to ADHD. Among his most successful students, he says, have been those with autism, who seem particularly responsive to the physical and mental focus karate instills in them. In 2006, one of his students, 11-year-old Brandon Earnshaw, became the first autistic person to qualify for a national karate tournament, and the first of many national qualifiers to come from Green’s program. “I have four students right now who have a really good possibility of qualifying in a qualifier in Alabama…and three of those four have autism,” he says.
Inspired by his experience, Green is writing a book, Karate and Autism, which he hopes to publish in the fall.
While Green specializes in teaching kids with challenges, his students run the gamut of ages and abilities. Except for a free Monday class offered expressly to people with special needs, his classes are inclusive—students with disabilities learn alongside those without. He says every child can benefit from karate, with its emphasis on quiet focus, manners and respect.
Corey Green took a few minutes to talk with Chattanooga Parent about those benefits, particularly for children with special needs.
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Q. One of your first students had a physical disability, but you seem to have segued more into students with the spectrum disorders and cognitive disabilities. Do you still teach people with physical disabilities?

A. Yes, I’ve taught two kids with stents in their heads. I’ve taught kids with cerebral palsy and spina bifida. I’ve taught deaf children, and I’ve also taught blind children.

Q. How have you learned to teach children with disabilities? Is it just something intuitive that you’ve built on over the years?

A. I start by understanding where they are coming from. Once you’ve done it so many times and you know what the light at the end of the tunnel’s going to look like, then you know the steps to getting them there.

Q. Tell me about your free class on Mondays.

A. There’s a waiting list for the free class on Mondays. Once students come into that class, they can stay as long as they like. We have students who have been coming for a year and a half. That class is only for children with special needs; all my other classes are open to anybody. Yesterday I had a class with six children in my beginner class, and half the class had autism—and we still got a lot done.”

Q. How do you accommodate students of various abilities without getting to the point that you’re not able to function as a class?

A. Discipline is a very important part of our class. For example, they’re not allowed to talk to others during class; if they do, they’re taking away the other person’s chance to learn…. It’s always a fine line between making sure that they’re learning and that they’re having fun. There has to be a balance—you can’t be too serious, like a drill sergeant, but you can’t be too relaxed with the students walking all over you.

Q. Some of the disabilities you work with are characterized by an inability to focus. How do you counteract that?

A. If you have a kid with ADHD and you talk like Ben Stein, you’re going to bore them to death. You have to stay animated. You change your range, pitch, volume, and the tone of your voice. The kids with autism might not even respond to that, but you have to maintain that control.
When you work with children with special needs, you have to make sure that they calm their mind and they calm their body, because the mind controls the body. If you don’t get them to calm down when you first start off, you’re going to have a really hard time. A lot of schools will take a child with autism and put him in a class with 20 other kids, and it never works, because they’re over-stimulated.

Q. There are too many bodies in there?

A. Yes. They get overwhelmed, claustrophobic in a way. There are too many things going on. You need to work with them one-on-one with no distractions, and then you get their focus, and you build them up to where they figure out the information, and then you put them in the class. Or you do what I do, teach a free class. That’s my favorite class to teach, the special needs class. The maximum I have in that class is six students.

Q. Do your students with special needs do the same work to advance as your other students?

A. That’s something that’s a little personal for me. This kid came into my school, he had special needs, he’s under the age of 10—and his mom told me that he was a black belt. And I said, “Really? A black belt?” Because in our school it takes three to five years. In our first class, I realized he couldn’t balance on one foot for more than two seconds…. I felt he had been taken advantage of. You should be honest when working with special needs kids. Don’t just give them something; make them earn it just like everyone else.

Q. What tools does karate give a child that he might not have had before?

A. What you’re learning essentially is how to defend yourself. We tell students, karate is for defense only. Anger is your enemy. Treat others as you want to be treated, and exercise good manners and self-discipline. We teach these as important characteristics of a person’s good character…. Karate is 90 percent mental and 10 percent physical.
Karate also teaches them how to get better grades in the classroom. I ask my kids, how do you get your As in school? Most people say focus, pay attention, study, and work hard. We say those things are all good, but what you have to have is a calm mind and calm body. You have to watch the teacher and not move around, passing notes and talking to your friends. That’s the key to getting straight As. And when you get straight As in school, you get more choices in life.
So karate doesn’t just teach kids how to punch and kick, although those things are essential to learning how to defend yourself. And we do teach students the proper time and place to practice, and those times are only with us in the studio and at home with your mom’s or dad’s permission.

Q. That’s tough, giving them the tools to defend themselves and then telling them not to use them.

A. We talk to them about how to avoid a fight. It’s a four-step process, and it’s really simple. That’s if you’re on your own, off school grounds. At school, if you’re bullied, you really should tell the teacher.

Q. What do you tell parents who are worried that karate will make their children more aggressive?

A. If a child is just naturally more aggressive, karate makes them more humble, and if they’re really shy, it makes them assertive, instead of being aggressive. “Aggressive” means you don’t know when to stop. “Assertive” means you know when to stop.

Upcoming events

Green’s Karate holds a summer camp June 29–July 3 and will host the 2nd Annual Chattanooga Karate Classic Oct. 3 at Lookout Valley Middle/High School. Last year’s event was the first traditional karate tournament in Chattanooga in 36, Green says. For more information, visit GreensKarate.com.