September 7th, 2012

I am writing this daily journal today because yesterday was quite a long day for me. We had a home game against Spencerport in volleyball. I felt like watching the sport in a game setting helped me to understand the "ins and outs" of it all much better. Our Junior Varsity team did quite well, we had a few errors, but in all our communication was much improved eventually leading to our victory. The Varsity though did not do so well. The amount of errors that they performed was unacceptable. Many people were out of position and of course when that happens, plays tend to break down. I never knew how intense of a sport volleyball can be, and I actually have found that I enjoy coaching and being part of that sport tremendously. Teaching went quite well. We showed an overview of rugby and assigned to the students lockers for the year. Now videos are usually not the best way to teach, but in the way that we did it I feel it was quite effective. For the first class my host teacher went over the video with the students, pointing out scrums, rucks, and line outs. After a while the students would start to recognize these and point them out themselves. This helped me to get an idea of what I should say. Toward the end of the day I ran an entire class. My host teacher was right there with me, but he did not do anything, not because he refused, but because he did not have to. I did not realize this until after I had run the entire class beginning to end. It was quite an amazing feeling. I have no background in rugby, and when I was going through the video I found myself relating the different techniques back to other sports like soccer, football, and wrestling, sports I know about. The students actually caught on better this way as well because now they had a reference point to work from. During the video I tried to incorporate math problems that had to do with scoring, and the students caught on quite fast. Overall it was a long, but good day.