Karate and algebra, a winning combination

By Charles Sowell  

JANUARY 19, 2012 2:15 p.m. (0)

“Whatever works is our motto here,” said Barry Horst, director of the Wired Minds tutoring center on South Suber Road in Greer, right across from Riverside High School.

Adam is a middle school student who went to Wired Minds to work on his algebra skills and in the process, self confidence, too.

“He’s the kind of kid who is tremendously physically active, who does Russian strength training,” said Horst. “One day he wasn’t getting into the study program and I asked him what did he want to do? And he told me ‘I need to walk around on my hands for awhile.’

“So I told him to do it. He walked around on his hands and got down. Then I asked him if he could go to his hands by squatting down and then going up on his hands without any support.”

“ ‘I can’t do that,’ Adam said and I asked him why not? Problem was he was afraid of failing. He finally tried and failed and then tried again and got up.”

“Great, I told him. And Adam said, ‘but I didn’t do it perfectly.’ ”

Learning that you don’t have to do things perfectly from the start is one of the greatest lessons in life for some bright young people, said Horst, who is 33.

“We want our kids to know that it’s better to get something wrong here than in the school room where it counts on grades.”

“We get the kids who are having problems with certain subjects here,” said Horst. “But we also get the kids who are doing very well and who want to excel, or skip a grade.”

They are starting an SAT tutoring program soon with a guaranteed score range for students who successfully complete the program.

The management and staff at Wired Minds and Empowerment Zone are unapologetically Christian but their methods are supremely pragmatic and the results can be astounding.

“We know we can’t save every child,” said Karl Daniel, who shares executive director duties with his wife Michelle at Empowerment Zone, a non-profit youth organization. “But we can save the ones we get here.”

Making learning fun is easier than most parents might suspect until they actually see the building housing Wired Minds and the Empowerment Zone.

The three-story structure is LEED designed; filled with natural light and intriguing spaces. It opened on Jan. 3.

“They built THIS place for me?” asked one elementary school student as he and his mom were touring the facility.

That’s by design, said Horst. “We wanted a place that is fun for the students to learn and fun for the staff to work in.”

The building itself is the brainchild of Horst’s father Bob, a retired businessman and professor of economics and finance at North Greenville University.

“I ended up here, basically, because my wife and I were bored with retirement,” said the senior Horst. “We had a place in Delaware on the shore and a place in Florida. There are only so many fish you can catch (he’s an avid fisherman). We were visiting Greenville liked the town and I started nosing around for jobs.”

It took a matter of days for the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School trained Horst to land a job at North Greenville.

He lured Barry and wife Erin to Greenville from a stint doing missionary work in one of the poorest towns in Pennsylvania. “I was teaching math to second graders and loving it,” Barry said.

Daniel, an aircraft engineer who graduated from Florida A&M, won a national karate championship in 1985. He came to Greenville from New York City after his wife visited relatives in the area and liked what she found.

“I’d taught school after a stint with Grumman Aerospace Systems in New York and did work with the Urban League up there,” Daniel said.

Daniel is a kid magnet with a voluble speaking style and a dash of New York City street wisdom.

He teaches karate and life skills in a downstairs dojo. Students at Wired Minds spend a couple of hours after school being tutored and then go downstairs for Daniel’s training before being picked up by their parents.

Wired Minds teaches in all subject areas with a staff of tutors who are more than just teachers.

“A lot of our people really get involved in the lives of their students,” said Barry Horst. “They celebrate birthdays, go to ball games with them and get to know them very well. We hear things from time to time that the parents really need to know about and quietly pass the information on to them.”

Comments

Add New

Leave a Comment
Comments are moderated and may not be posted immediately.
Name:
Email:	do not notifynotify
Title:
	Please input the anti-spam code that you can read in the image.

3.26 Copyright (C) 2008 Compojoom.com / Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."