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During my sophomore year of college, I was trying to figure out what class I wanted to take to fulfill a specific requirement. Since I enjoyed dance when I was little, I had hoped to take ballroom dancing but then found out that class was full. As I continued scrolling, I came across African dance. I was intrigued and looked up comments about this class and read only good things about it so I decided to try it out!

On the first day of class, I didn't realize what I had gotten myself into. Our teacher started dancing for us and I had never experienced any sort of movement in any of my years of dancing. I was hoping that my years of tap, jazz and ballet would help me with this class but due to the free, quick movements, I was not prepared. I was hoping transfer, or when there is a gain or loss in proficiency of one skill due to practice of another skill, would occur due to practice with other types of dances. But instead of my previous practice helping, it hindered my performance. When a previous experience hinders the performance of another skill, this is known as negative transfer. With ballet and the other dances I learned, precision and gracefulness were always very important. Since our teacher wanted us to be able to move freely and not have very precise movements, it was harder to learn to be free than if I had never been trained in dance. Though there was negative transfer, positive transfer also occurred. Positive transfer is when previous experiences are beneficial on learning and performing. Since I had learned how to watch someone closely and then mimic their movements, I was able to catch on pretty quick while other students needed to watch numerous times and have the teacher help them one on one. After I got more comfortable with this new way of moving, I enjoyed the exciting and quick ways of African dance!

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Young Girl Dancing Sticker for iOS & Android | GIPHY

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Homerun for Random: Blocked and Random Practice

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Homerun for Random: Blocked and Random Practice

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Before I was of the age of joining my own team, many of my summer nights consisted of watching my older brother's play baseball. Since all I wanted to do when I was little was hang with my bigger brothers, I started playing baseball with them in the back yard. I loved the satisfying feeling when you get a good hit or the praise when I caught a pop fly from my brothers. Because of them, I decided to start playing softball.

In middle school, my coach had me play short stop, and I fell in love with that position. Since 13 year olds weren't able to hit the ball into the outfield as often, most of the time, the balls were coming to me. During practices, my coach would put us through a drill where she would hit the ball to a random spot and we didn't know who it would go to or if it would be a grounder or pop fly. My coach demonstrated random practice which is when the order of a task is different from one trial to the next and one is not able to predict what will come next. In this case, since my coach varied both the person the ball was going to and what type of a hit it would be, we always had to be prepared and ready to make a move. Due to the randomness, I had to keep moving my body in different ways. This type of practice was very beneficial since in a game we wouldn't be able to know where the ball would be hit. In addition, my coach would give us some blocked practice too. Blocked practice consisted of a skill being repeated over and over so we had the same movements and knew what to expect. She used blocked practice when she wanted us to learn a certain way to move our feet. For example, she would hit a grounder to the right of us five times in a row so we were able to get the footwork down of shuffling over then throwing the ball to first base. After those five, she would hit the ball to the left for the next five so we could work on the footwork going the opposite direction. Even though in a game situation I never knew where the ball would go, blocked practice was helpful for learning the new footwork and getting used to shuffling and throwing the ball to first. Her ways of teaching and practicing were very effective and helped our team have an undefeated season.

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Uno Dos Tres-ACE ACE ACE!: Augmented Feedback

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Uno Dos Tres-ACE ACE ACE!: Augmented Feedback

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During my freshman year of High School, I wanted to get involved with some clubs and different groups so I could meet more people. My family always played sand volleyball when I was younger and I always thoroughly enjoyed it. So, after trying to learn some of the rules for actual volleyball, I headed off to tryouts. After a few days of not really knowing exactly what I was doing and but pretending like I did, I made the team. During the first half of the week for practice we went through the basics: how to bump, set and spike. The second half we split into groups of what positions we would be playing. Since I was tall, I was a middle hitter which meant spiking and blocking would be my specialties.

One of the coaches took the middles aside and gave us each ten spikes to start with. Since I was newer to volleyball, I was not yet sure what exactly I was doing wrong. All the feedback I had gotten thus far was inherent feedback which was what the feedback I could see such as the ball landing in or out of bounds. Now that a coach was able to give some one on one feedback, I was able to get some augmented feedback, or, information about my hitting from an outside source such as my coach. She let me hit a few balls and then gave me a little feedback. She used to sandwich approach, some feedback on how I could change certain things about my swing and timing sandwiched between things I was doing well. This was helpful information that I was able to apply to the next few balls I hit. As I worked on the things she had pointed out, she encouraged me and would let me know when I had forgotten to do something. Her approach of complimenting me helped motivate me and she also didn't give me feedback every single swing which was helpful because I was able to analyze my own swing and figure out what felt wrong. Due to the perfect balance of intrinsic and augmented feedback, I was able to make some kills during my first match. Thanks coach!

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During family trips, my mom and dad would always call me their little fishy. Whenever we were at a hotel that had a pool, every night I would ask them to go swimming and every night they had to drag me out of the pool. If I could I would have stayed in the pool until my whole body was a prune. Due to this infatuation, my mom signed me up for swim team. Though I had passed all the stages of swimming lessons, I had never been taught how to do the butterfly stroke.

If you've never seen a bunch of eight year olds learn how to do this stroke, you would worry that a bunch of kids are drowning while the coach sits there watching and encouraging them. As you can guess, this stroke when tried by a novice consists of gasping for air, arm flailing and splashing everywhere. Due to this stroke being a little more challenging, our coach decided to spend a whole practice teaching it. Looking back, I realize that I used Fitts and Posner's three stages. The first stage, cognitive stage, consists of mostly of verbal and cognitive processes. Our coach walked us through the movement saying "bring your arms up like you're a grizzly bear, push your hips back, swing your arms forward and slap your feet down". He repeated this several times and once I started trying the stroke in the water, I was saying it in my mind. Though I kept saying this to myself, I still would be inconsistent with my movements: I'd kick too fast or not breathe at the right moment or bring my arms around at the wrong time. After some practicing and already feeling more confident in the stroke, I was ready to keep working on it the next few days. The second phase I went through was the associative stage where strategies are solidified, talking through the task is gone and one is able to detect when one messes up. When I hoped back in the water, I didn't need to talk myself through every step and my movements became more consistent in the order of the stroke. I realized that cupping my hands and keeping my legs together were the best strategies for this stroke. Soon, this stroke became my favorite stroke and I was racing every meet with it. Finally the next year, after a lot of practice and races, I reached the autonomous stage which is the stage where the movement becomes very automatic and where one is able to detect and then correct any error. Fly, though much more physically demanding, had become as easy as freestyle was to me. I didn't have to think to do it, all I had to do was jump in the water and just keep swimming!

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Gotta Getcha Head in the Game: Mental Practice

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Gotta Getcha Head in the Game: Mental Practice

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Ever since I was five, basketball was my favorite sport. In elementary school, as soon as I'd get home, my little brother and I would spend hours in the basement playing 1v1 on a five foot hoop. When I was finally able to play on a team in fifth grade, I was ecstatic. That enthusiasm quickly came to a halt once I realized the half-court, slow paced game I'd be playing was much different than the full court, quick paced game my brothers played. Even though I didn't enjoy the season as much, my mom convinced me to play the next year since it would be full court (thank goodness she did). Moving onto middle school, my love for basketball kept growing. Endless hours in the driveway shooting hoops with my little brother was never enough time. We would milk every last minute out of the day until we weren't able to see the ball against the dark sky anymore. In middle school I learned all the cliché rules like "put your hand in the cookie jar" and ran endless suicides.

When high school basketball came, I was so nervous for my first day of tryouts. The school I went to was very competitive, and I wasn't sure what to expect. Before tryouts came, my mom told me that I should try what many athletes do which is visualizing themselves playing their sport or doing a specific task such as shooting a free-throw without doing any actual physical movements. This idea is known as mental practice. Since I had learned by now that my mom is always right, I decided to try it out. At first it was weird trying to picture myself doing something without actually making a movement but I finally got the hang of it. For the week leading up to my tryouts, I would use internal imagery which is when someone imagines themselves in their own body performing a task. As I would lay in bed at night, I would run through the motions of a free-throw, I'd imagine myself getting a pass from the point guard and shooting a three pointer and I would imagine myself jumping of my foot to make a layup. With each 'shot' I took, I could feel the sensation of my wrist flicking forward, the ball just rolling off my fingertips, having the perfect arch and finally hearing that satisfying sound of a swish. Though actual practice is the best way to practice, mental practice still can make a difference. So by the end of the day when I was worn out and needed to rest my body, metal practice was the best solution to still get some work in. Finally when tryouts came, all the physical and mental work I had done paid off since I was the first freshman in seven years to make varsity! Thank you Mom and Troy Bolton from 'High School Musical' for teaching me the strength of my mind!

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