Journal Entry for 9-9-2008

Well, to start anyways I suppose I will respond to things from my previous journal. I said that I was assistant coaching, however I neglected to say what I was coaching! I’m the assistant coach for the Berea Community Cross Country team, and this is my third season. I’m very excited about this because I think it will definitely look good on my resume, and at the very least it can’t hurt. In reference to the second page of my previous entry, I said something about teaching younger students and omitting certain parts of lesson plans or perhaps adapting them because of their age, which is what I would think is probably the best course of action. I suppose I look at this with a very P.E. type of perspective, which I’d say is a good thing. With older kids you would be able to do probably more in the way of sport type activities than you would with younger children, though of course the reason that this is possible is because they have hopefully learned the skills needed for these sports at a younger age, perhaps during a P.E. class. So instead of not doing anything with them at a young age, I think a good way to adapt them would be to do lessons that would be bits and pieces the games that they could possibly play in the future. Thinking about teaching and teachers having reasons for everything done in the classroom has made me think about some of my classes so far this semester. At first it seemed like we were wasting time in one of my classes, because it’s supposed to be about elementary physical education, but so far in the class almost all we have worked on is track and field. At first I thought this was just because the professor loves the sport, which he does, but there were also other reasons. An obvious reason was the Boomer Games that took place this pervious Saturday, because our class was doing the track and field portion of the games. However, thinking about it more, I think that it also was intended to help us grow closer as a class because we got to go outside and have fun learning about some of the track events, and it also covered one of the later chapters in our text book. Thinking like this has caused me to look back on some of previous classroom experiences, and then some of the reasons for doing what we were doing at the time. I remember in elementary school, we used to do ABC trunk twisters, where we would spin our upper bodies left and right without moving our feet and say our ABC’s. We always made fun of this as we got older and thought we were hot stuff in 4^th grade and to mature for those types of activities, but now I can see some of the reasons for them. Not only did it serve as a stretch and warm up, but it also tied in another curriculum to a physical activity, and helped us reinforce the brain pathway that helped us remember the ABC’s. One thing I’ve been hearing a lot about lately is this new education act in the state of Kentucky, where students and faculty alike are no longer allowed to say anything negative to anyone else within school or at a school function then a police report must be filed. I think that in a way this can be a good thing, but on the other hand I think that it can be highly overdone. Maybe keep records of it in the school, and after so many then file a report to the police, however I think the way it is right now the police will be getting call after call about little kids just saying things that aren’t meant to be taken in a mean way and then get blown out of proportion and having a police report filed against them. I’m not sure if I’ve got this entirely correct, but I think it is something that interests me, because I know that it affects this state, and once something is taken as a law in one state it could possibly spread to others. Maybe it is good though, because although some friends are mean to each other in a fun and non-mean spirited way, I think that kids should learn to express themselves in ways that aren’t mean, because sometimes even though someone doesn’t want to say it to be mean, but it can be taken that way regardless of the meaning. I also think that there could easily be some teachers being written up for saying things that could be taken out of context, but again, these things should probably be learned to be said differently also. I liked what we did on class this past week when we talked about our most memorable learning experience. I thought it was really interesting and cool to see how much almost all of them had in common. It also makes me happy that I am becoming a PE teacher, because hopefully I will be able to teach someone something that they will remember not only because of the information, but because it was a fun experience.