A Glen Burnie karate school has gained international attention for its unique program to teach martial arts students how to cope with bullies.
On Sunday, a Washington, D.C.-based television crew from NHK, Japan?s largest public broadcasting station, taped a class at Al Bartlinkski?s Karate Super Center on Crain Highway in Glen Burnie. The crew was filming for a show that will be broadcast later in Japan.
“Bullying is a big issue in Japan right now,” said Kaori Iida,a reporter for NHK. “We were looking into schools in the states to find out how they were handling the issue, and we found out about this.”
During the specially scheduled Sunday class, instructors and students practiced responses to bullying behavior. In one encounter, the student stepped back from the bully, extended her arms with her palms facing the bully, and said firmly, “Back away, leave me alone.”
Iida said bullying has been blamed for many deaths recently in Japan, with news of student suicides routinely making the front page of local newspapers. Iida said many Japanese schools are struggling to acknowledge the problem of bullying.
While Japan is considered the cradle of modern martial arts, Iida said, Japanese students choose martial arts as an alternative to other sports rather than a means of self-defense or confidence-building.
Al Bartlinski, who has owned the karate school with his father since the early 1970s, said he began integrating techniques for dealing with bullies into his training in 2002 after he met up with Terrence Webster-Doyle, a schoolteacher and martial-arts enthusiast, at a conference. Doyle is also the author of “Why Is Everybody Always Picking on Me,” a handbook for helping children handle bullying without violence.
Bartlinski said he teaches his students, ages 4 and older, that a physical fight with a bully is a last resort. He said the students learn the physical cues bullies look for in a victim, including lack of direct eye contact and slouching posture. The physical martial-arts skills students learn “give[s] them the confidence to deal with a situation.” Each class includes about 10 minutes of instruction in handling bullies.
“We?re getting them to focus on the objective of getting out of the situation without a fight,” Bartlinski said.
He said the students are also encouraged to be nice to the bully, run away from the situation and tell an adult about the problem as other ways of coping.
