Camas students excel at national martial arts event

Ellen Burton, Okerlund’s mother and a Camas City Council member, said Soo Bahk Do instructors are “excellent — dedicated, caring, highly trained professionals who go the extra mile for their students.”

Burton said her other son, as well as her husband, also train at the Camas studio.

“Everyone is both a learner and a teacher,” Burton said. “The advanced students participate in training the beginning and intermediate students, so they develop relationships and empathy while learning from each other. The program is tailored to each student, and when they do (take) tests, they are thoroughly prepared. When Andrew participates in regional and national tournaments, he realizes he is much better prepared than the other competitors.”

Remote training challenges teachers, students

When their studio closed in March, Anna Oulashin, Helen Bagnall, Smith, Sean Oulashin and Okerlund quickly transitioned their lessons to Zoom, which they’ve used ever since except for a five-week stretch in October and November when the facility was allowed to re-open for in-person instruction.

“To not be able to position (the students’) hands or position their feet (has been challenging),” Anna Oulashin said. “The mirror images of ‘left’ and ‘right’ have posed challenges. If you look at my floor right now, it’s got painter’s tape, the letters for ‘left’ and ‘right,’ for those that are challenged in those ways. In the studio, I could say, ‘Move this way’ or ‘move that way.’ But because there are some members that have those challenges, I have to say, ‘Move to the right,’ so I have an ‘R’ on the floor, and I have tape going off in different directions to symbolize west or southwest or southeast so they get a better feel on how to move for a form if I’m trying to teach it to them.”

Some students have struggled to find adequate space to train from their homes, but the instructors have compensated by modifying some of their instructions to create what Anna Oulashin calls a “bathtub training” mindset.

“In my daylight basement, I have enough room to do everything that I need to do, but I taped off the center part so I can show them, ‘You can still do the techniques in this limited amount of space. You just have to make some physical adjustments,'” she said.

“When we first started out last spring and last summer, a couple of (students) were training outside because there’s more room, but as we got into fall and winter, they transitioned inside. There are two families that have three participants each training together, so that posed a challenge because they had to make space in various parts of the house to be separate from each other. But we’ve overcome those challenges. We’ve had a couple people train on the treadmill because that’s the space that they have. People are training in their garage, and a couple of people are training in their bedrooms.”

Okerlund wrote in a school essay that he has “been enlightened on the techniques of communication, understanding (students’) strengths and their weaknesses, and most of all how to facilitate improvement and adapt” his teaching methods to the remote environment.

“The experience of teaching such a wide variety of students — some I have never even met in person, all with different natural abilities, struggles, backgrounds and successes — has helped me gain a fuller grasp of the potential that all people carry and how to facilitate growth in a challenging situation,” Okerlund wrote.

The students “are getting the hang of” remote training, but are “not really liking it,” according to Anna Oulashin.

“We had a ranked promotion (event) just before Christmas break, and obviously we socially distanced and had masks on, but to see their eyes light up when they saw their ‘family members’ was amazing,” she said. “All of us are saying, ‘We can’t wait to get back to in-person training and do all of the things that we used to do.'”