10 hours of Outside Practical Experience

I actually have 2 different places where I did my outside practical experience.  The first was at my previous school Herkimer County Community College.  There I helped my previous softball team with their practice by running drills, explaining strategies and ways to handle situations in a game, etc.  I mainly worked with the outfielders during defensive work.  One of the drills I had them do was what we call at SUNY Cortland the T drill.  In this drill one outfielder goes at a time, and you as the administrator of the drill, have to throw softballs at the particular spot for them to run and catch.  The first route they must run is straight back.  On this route the administrator should throw a lob type of ball for them to catch just over their head.  Then they continue running to the left where you will throw them a sharp line drive type of ball that leads them where they have to stretch to catch it.  Then they need to stop as quickly as possible ond run in the opposite direction (to your right) and and run a ways where you will throw them a high but far pop fly that they need to catch up to to catch.  After that they run directly towards you where you wait for them to get near and toss a short ball that they need to slide to catch.

Diagram of T-Drill I drew on paint. Click to see larger image.

In this drill have the rest of the oufielders stand in a line some to the right and some to the left of you.  After the outfielder who is going catches one ball they should roll it in to the line of outfielders and continue running through the drill.  If the outfielder who is going doesnt catch the ball they should leave the ball behind and continue on through the next route.  This drill is meant to tire the athletes.  It is for cardiovascular endurance, stamina, and skill enhancement.

I also did my practical work during our all day softball clinic here at SUNY Cortland.  The  softball team puts this on every year as a fundraiser.  We had a jawdropping 220 girls come to this year's clinic.  Many travel teams bring all their players to the clinic to work through it together.  During the defensive portion of the clinic my fellow outfielders and I ran some outfield drills with every group.  During the hitting session I was individually assigned to teach and administer the tennis ball change-up drill.  This drill is to be done with partners.  One partner is hitting and the other is the tosser.  The tosser must stand on a chair, holding a tennis ball with their arm straight out.  They will then drop the ball in a spot about a foot in front of the toes of the hitter's front foot.  The hitter will then wait for the ball to bounce and then try to hit the ball when it comes back up.  This teaches the players to wait for the ball before initiating the swing.  It helps them in the situation of a change-up being pitched to them.  The hitting session was like a marathon.  There were 22 groups with about 8-10 girls per group.  So it got pretty repetitive explaining the drill 22 times.  Haha.  At the end of the day though, it was worth it because they all had a great time and learned a little more about softball.

D-Day! Day 32

Today was my Lab D day!

     I'll be honest I was so nervous.  I knew I had to make this lesson awesome because there's a lot riding on it.  Number one is that this Lab is weighted the most grading wise.  Number two I didn't do the best I could have on the previous labs so I needed to do well on this one to make up for it.  Number three this is one of my Professor's favorite lessons so I didn't want to let him down.  And lastly the guy who invented the gaming system came to our lessons so I didn't want to let hime down! Stressful!  But I did fine and he seemed impressed so all is well.

     My instant activity was a spring egg hunt.  It was about a week and a half after Easter so I knew it was too late to call it an Easter egg hunt.  I hid the plastic colorful eggs throughout the classroom.  Inside the eggs were the answers to the questions on the diabetes worksheet I had passed out.  Here's one of my mistakes.  I didn't realize how long it was going to take them to finish the worksheet.  Haha, I guess I made the eggs too hard to find.  Next thing I knew it was already 5 minutes into my lesson.  And here's another mistake, I should have played music while they were looking and doing the worksheet because as you can see from my video the first 5ish minutes are just dead air and it was very boring.  I then went over the worksheet and talked about what our focus was for the lesson which was Diabetes.  I drew a picture of a little boy who was "my nephew Evan"  and has type 1 diabetes.  I had described how today was his 7th birthday and all he wanted for his birthday was to eat his birthday goodies which were cake, ice-cream, and candy.  Throughout the lesson I also mentioned that he loved soda too.  Even though these aren't exactly the healthiest choices they were permitted only for today because it was his birthday. 

I asked them to be in a plank position but
they could modify it by doing a plank from the knees

      The game we were playing was Stepmania exergaming punching bags.  Basically this is like DDR but instead of stepping on a dance pad you strike a big punching bag with the arrows on it.  I described the activity in that all of my students were team insulin and that each and every one of them was an insulin molecule and that they needed to help out my nephew Evan by travelling in his blood stream and taking care of all the glucose molecules in his blood from eating all of his birthday goodies.  I said that the arrows on the screen were the glucose molecules and that we had to neutralize them.  I let them play a few songs with just one person at the punching bag at a time.  For each song the people who weren't at the bags I had them at practice dance pads hitting it with a partner in a plank position.

"INSULIN SHOT!"

     After a few songs to warm up and get used to it a bit, I had them do an activity I like to call Insulin Shot.  In this activity the difficulty level of the song will be bumped up to hard.  One student will be at each punching bag to start out.  Then 2 students will be assigned to assist the first student at each bag.  These 2 will be waiting behind a line ready to come in and help when they hear the signal.  One of these two will help by taking the left arrow and the other will have the right.  Then the original will only be responsible for the top and bottom arrows.  I will play the song for about 30 seconds.  While the one student struggles to keep up with the arrows the other students are waiting patiently to help.  Then when the time is right I scream INSULIN SHOT!  that is the signal for the others to run in and help.  The goal here is to make a come back and be able to complete the song with at least a 75%.  Everybody seemed to really like this part of the lesson.  It was my favorite part too.  There was a moment in my lesson where Devon had hit the side arrows as I was setting up the song and he had changed the difficulty.  I didn't notice that he did it until I watched the video.  I had thought that the other bag was the one that had changed so there was a moment towards the end where I panicked a bit.  My time coding form shows almost a minute of waiting time there which stinks because I think I would have had <5% waiting time if I hadn't made that mistake.

Day 31

     Today we went in the pool.  Not my favorite.  I'll be honest I really hope I don't get a job at a school that has a pool because I'm a terrible swimmer. 
     Anyway, Mike and Devon taught today and I thought  they did a pretty good job.  For Devon's lab he taught a water aerobics class.  I thought his hook was hilarious.  He told us how he went to a water aerobics class with his grandma! I thought that was a funny image to think about.  But he kind of killed two birds with one stone because he also provided us with an imaginary place to go outside of class for more water aerobics opportunities. 
     Then Mike went.  He did his class on ultimate pool frisbee.  It was really interesting because he gave us noodles to use as arm extestions basically.  We used them for defense by trying to whack the frisbee in the air and prevent a pass from our opponents.  The only thing I would have liked more about that was if he gave us a larger area to work with.  Because there were moments where we just got clustered up and were flinging our noodles around.  That could have been a safety issue but all in all it wasn't really a big deal.

Day 30

     Today was another Lab D day.  Eric and Justin went today and they taught table tennis.  I thought their progressions were really good.  They had us using a bigger ball we used our hands instead of starting off with the ping pong ball and a paddle.  The only thing about this was the balls they chose didn't bounce very well.  I wish we could have used tennis balls instead because it would have seemed more realistic to the bounce of a ping pong ball.  
     For Justin's lesson Professor Yang had Trisha and I flirt with him very inappropriatly.  It was so funny and I thought he did a pretty good job of dealing with it.  Makes me glad I'm one of the last groups going so I can prepare for these types of things and they won't suprise me.

Day 29

     Today was just an in class day.  We talked about things we needed to get done for Lab D and things we need to get done by the end of the course.  Such as the culminating video of our progressions as teacher candidates throughout Lab A to Lab D.
     We also talked about how we should react as teachers to students who are misbehaving.  We discussed the different steps we could take like something minimally severe such as proximity all the way to the most severe which is sending the student to the principal's office.  Proximity can be described as where the teacher is standing in the room.  If I as a teacher notice that little Frankie is misbehaving and trying to show off to his friends, I might stand near him as I observe or speak to the class.  One Frankie notices where I am he will most likely change his behavior.

Day 28

Unfortunately I couldn't attend this class because we had games in buffalo that weekend.  But I heard some great things about Dan's lesson.  Dan did Zumba and I heard his routine was pristine and he was very energetic and motivating. 

One of the issues Dan faced was that he had a blind student in his class.  All of his cues and direction was visual based so he had quite an issue in his hands.  But he got through it okay and we learned a valuable lesson to be prepared for anything.

Day 27

     On day 27 Trish was our first Lab D candidate.  She did a magnificent job!  None of the TAs or Professor Yang had any bad things to say.  She put in a lot of work to make a yoga video which she starred in. 

She did a great job with handling some of the misbehaving students in class.