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When I was in eighth grade I played the trumpet. I do not play anymore because I am so busy, but I still have my old trumpet and still remember how to play scales and read sheet music. At my school there was this event called Solo 'N Ensemble where kids could pick a piece of their choice and perform it for a volunteer judge in a solo, duet, or other ensemble. I chose to play with my friend at the time, however, she was going on a family trip on the day of the event, so my duet turned into a solo. I do not remember the name of the song, but I remember how it goes and I am fairly certain I could still play it from memory if I had to.
It was a week before the event that I was told it would be a solo and my band teacher helped me create a solo version of the song that was to be performed. Of course I was so nervous! My plans had gotten all turned around a week before the Solo 'N Ensemble! My teacher advised me to learn the sheet music in chunks. She said going through the entire thing at one time would be really overwhelming for me especially since we made revisions to 3 of the 5 pages of sheet music. Using this part practice way of learning really helped me because I could get a feel for how a certain section felt after practicing that one section a few times. Getting a feel for if the page was mostly gentle or timid helped me transition from one state of playing to another when the time came. After performing my piece, the judge had such wonderful things to say. He told me that I sounded so clear and passionate for my age and that really made me smile.

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I want to be a physical therapist, and one of the requirements to get into Physical Therapy school is to have a certain number of hours watching a licensed physical therapist practice. This past semester, I have been shadowing a PT who works for the Madison Metropolitan Area School District. One of his students we work with is named Adrian (his name had been changed to protect his identity). Adrian has weak hips, and low tone in general, so the PT and I work with him on gaining strength in those areas. Specifically, we work with him to keep one knee down and keep the other up, like the man in the gif below. This is very hard for Adrian and since he has developmental delay, sometimes trying to explain the movement to him can get too complicated and he gets frustrated. So, one way we can get him to try to do the task is by demonstrating how to do it by modeling what we want him to do. Usually Adrian will see what we are doing and will attempt to recreate the position and he is usually successful! For Adrian, modeling movements is a really good way for him to understand what we want rather than trying to explain to him what we want him to do.

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I'm sitting on the grass stretching during track practice with my friends and our assistant coach Brandon (we called him Beef for whatever reason) runs over to me. Out of breath and huffing he asked me if I would be willing to try high jumping. Startles, I said no way! I have no idea how to do that! What if I land on the pole and break my back? What if I can't even make the lowest height? What about all my other events? Beef pleaded with me and told me they needed an answer now. I rolled my eyes and finally agreed if our coach agreed to buy us dinner at tomorrow's track meet. Beef said he would see what he could do and ran back to the coaches room. I trained with the other two high jumpers that day which was really fun, but as expected I was really bad at all the drills. They first had me get my running pattern which changed a lot and was extremely inconsistent.
Finally, the next day it is the moment my one day of work has come to. Beef agreed to watch my form and help me out. First jump, I put my toes on the marker I had set for myself and take a deep breath. One, two three steps, gain speed, and jump. Knocked the bar off... I took another jump and again the bar fell onto the metal platform on the ground rattling. Everyone was looking at me and I looked at the ground. "I suck at this" I thought. Then, Beef took me to the side and told me I could take a break and to close my eyes and imagine myself doing everything right. He asked me to use internal imagery to imagine myself taking my three steps to start, and then take off and attack the bar. That bar cannot hurt me, if anything I will be the one hurting the bar. I did this and thought to myself I can do this. I rehearsed the process over and over. I thought about myself in my own body completing the task and I also practiced external imagery thinking about what Beef would be looking for when he was watching my form. Finally, I took my last jump and... I made it! I cleared 5 feet 4 inches that day and even earned a medal at that small track meet. Not bad for my first time high jumping! After that, high jump was my favorite event and I was actually not bad. By the end of my track career I was able to clear 5'8 which is as tall as I am!

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When I was fifteen I was so excited to get my drivers permit. I was so ready to start driving when I got that sweet, sweet learners permit. "Dad, can we take the car out for a spin?" I asked. He took a deep breath and said he supposed it was time to teach me. "Ohhhhh yeah!" I thought. I was going to be a cool kid in my 2006 Honda Civic. We got into the car and my dad taught me how to keep the brakes and the gas pedal straight. Easy enough. We spun around in the parking lot for a while, but that was too boring. "Dad, I'm fifteen. I can handle driving this thing! Can we please go out on the actual road now?" I asked. My father agreed and we took the car out on some really quite country roads. I was a little more nervous now, talking myself through everything between deep breaths, trying to figure out the best way to reach the signal button and how to rest my foot so that if I needed to hit the brakes I could do it quickly; in other words, I was in the cognitive stage of learning, and I was not ready for what was about to happen. My dad was in the passenger seat micromanaging every move and eventually I was not having any of it so I told him that it was totally fine and no one was on the road even if I messed up. What was the worst that could happen? He finally backed off a bit and I laughed as we approached an upcoming stop sign. "See dad? Totally fin---" *BANG*! I see a flash of feathers and try stepping on the brakes but hit the gas and completely blow a stop sign. We had apparently hit some kind of medium/large sized bird. Visibly shaken I keep driving exactly the speed limit of 55 and peek over at my dad. "...And that was a stop sign... you're lucky no one was around or we could have died!" he said sternly. More lecturing followed, needless to say I was not very happy when we got home and my mom asked how everything went.
I would like to say I am now somewhere between the associative and autonomous stage of learning because my movements are mostly automatic and I can detect errors fairly easily, like when someone cuts me off in traffic I can see it coming before it actually happens. Additionally, simultaneous things going on like talking to other people doesn't really bother me or distract me anymore.

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I used to run track in high school, particularly the 200 meter sprint. When I was a senior my coach asked me to be a peer leader and teach some of the new or younger kids how to get out of the blocks. Easy enough, right? Well, what would follow was one of the most embarrassing situations I've been in. I brought the kids over to the starting line and tried explaining how to get out of the blocks. "How should it look?" and "How do I crunch up like that?" were only some of the questions I got. I was having a difficult time explaining since the information was in my procedural memory, so I was unable to really explain my movements because they had become so natural to me over the years. Imagine trying to explain walking or jumping to someone; it's a little tough to do that since we've been doing it since childhood, right? Eventually, I showed them how to do it by demonstrating and explained they should feel like they are falling while running as fast as they possibly can. Unfortunately, this was not the best explanation of the task because one girl actually took a fall like the runner in the gif below. I scrambled over to try and help her, but she was crying too hard for me to calm her down since the track scraped up her chin and part of her cheek. My eyes got really wide while I tried reassuring her (and myself) that it didn't look too bad. Finally, my coach hustled over to us and asked what happened. After explaining that I might not have done the best job at explaining how to get out of blocks my coach just looked at me a while and told me I could help out raking the sand pits. Thankfully, I did not find a way to screw that up!