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I’ve loved drawing since before I can remember.  My parents say they used to have to hide all the writing utensils in the house because I would use the walls of the house as my canvas.  My love for drawing has not since ceased and, to this day, I’m still able to use art as an outlet for my rampant imagination and inability to focus too long on one thing at a time.  My parents fed my infatuation with art from a young age (once I realized the wall wasn’t my canvas) and began buying me colored pencils, markers, drawing books, and other art supplies like that.  There, however, comes a time where your worries shift from trivial things like hoping dad packed your favorite fruit cup for lunch to more important worries like schoolwork and extracurriculars.  With more of my time and energy being expended towards school and sports, I found myself drawing/painting less and less.  I thought for this scrapbook, since you look forward to getting to know your students, it would be a waste not to include a section about how much I love drawing.  Presented below are three pictures.  After setting a timer for 3 minutes, 1 minute, and 10 seconds, I began drawing a little picture of my good friend Squirt in the respective box.  As you can see, Squirt seems to become more and more presentable as I have more time to draw him.  Squirts appearance can all be explained through something known as the speed-accuracy trade-off.  The speed-accuracy trade-off states that the performance of a motor movement skill is better when you take more time to perform the skill.  We find that in order to be fast, the accuracy of the skill would need to be poor.  In order to be accurate, the time it takes to perform the task will increase.  In regards to drawing, this means that the faster I try to draw something, the worse it will look.  So, because I had only 10 seconds to draw Squirt in the bottom box, we find that he doesn’t quite seem to be drawn as well as when I was given 3 minutes to draw him.

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My best friend in the whole world is one of the most athletic people I’ve ever met in my life.  He has all the main attributes that make a good athlete; he’s fast, strong, agile, confident, motivated, humble, and is a natural leader.  Along with all of those attributes, he is also remarkably skilled when it comes to perfecting movements relevant to different sports.  To name a few, he has the vision needed to find the open defender in soccer, the elusiveness to make defenders miss tackles in football, the speed to lock down defenders in basketball, and the hand-eye coordination required to excel at tennis.  This man is so good at sports, it just kind of makes you hate him a little bit.  But he is also so nice that you can’t stay mad at him for long even after he just got done beating you in tennis, a sport that you've been playing for four years, and he’s only played twice.  While that particular game was infuriating, his ability to outperform me in basically every sport is really what motivated me all throughout high school to practice and become better.  I quite honestly owe all that I am as an athlete to this man’s ability to always one-up me.

While my friend loves playing all sports in general, his favorite sport by far is soccer.  He played all 4 years of high school soccer on Varsity and helped lead the team to state 3 of those 4 years.  During high school he was also recruited multiple times by the high school's head football coach who was looking for a dynamic running back.  Despite the offers, he stuck with only officially playing soccer, while playing backyard games of football, basketball, and tennis with friends on the side.  Although he only officially played soccer in high school, his speed was noticed by college track recruiters who ended up offering him invitations to practice with D1 collegiate track teams.  His skill is unparalleled, and it seems to me that he could excel in any sport you ask him to try.  This proficiency in a variety of physical activities was talked about a little bit in class when we were explaining the “all-around athlete.”  In order to first understand the phenomenon that is the all-around athlete, we must first understand what abilities are and how they affect the performance of an individual.  Abilities are un-modifiable by practice and represents the general capacity for an individual’s performance of a specific skill.  Different skills require different abilities known as motor abilities.  When an individual is proficient with one motor abilities, they usually excel at performing activities that utilize those motor abilities.  With this being known, I would hypothesize that the majority of my friend’s motor abilities are higher than that of my own.  In the simple way of explaining, you either got it or you don’t… and he’s definitely got it.

This picture is of Kyler Murray who many consider to be an all-around athlete.  Kyler already has an offer to play in the MLB with the Athletic A’s.  On top of that, just a few days ago, Kyler hoisted the Heisman trophy, one of the most prestigious awards in all of college football.

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This summer right before school started a friend and I were biking to James Madison Park.  There is a nice downhill section towards the end of the bike ride that I proceeded to bike down without any hands.  I had taught myself how to bike without hands when I was in middle school and often utilize this technique while biking around town.  While I was a little shaky at the start and would often lose my balance, the many hours of practice I logged without hands soon had me flying around town without hands (except when I needed to brake).  Now, after even more years of biking, I am able to safely maneuver the busy streets of Madison without hands.  My friend, after seeing me fly down the road to the park without hands, asked me if I could teach her how to bike without hands.  At first, I thought this would be easy.  After all, I do consider myself to be very good at the task.  Teaching my friend how to bike without hands actually proved to be a lot more difficult than I imagined.  Because I was so familiar with the task itself, I often under explained the different skills that need to be performed in order to bike without hands.  It wasn’t until Kinesiology 361 where I learned why I was having such a hard time explaining the task of biking without hands to my friend.  We would say that I have a higher procedural memory and a lower declarative memory when it comes to riding a bike without hands.  Declarative Memory systems allow us to know what to do in a certain situation.  We can declare/describe what we need to do using words with this type of memory system.  The procedural memory system allows us to know how to do something and actually perform a skill.  Biking without hands has become so automatic to me that I no longer need to constantly remind myself how to do it.  Because of that, I oddly enough now have no clue how to do it (or at least, explain how I do it).

I included this picture of Meredith Miller winning the  U.S. National Road Race Championship because this picture perfectly captures how I always feel when I’m coasting on my bike with no hands.  It is such a fun and freeing experience that I can’t help but smile when I’m presented with the opportunity to “fly.”

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During the cold winter breaks of college, hockey became a very popular activity played by many to pass time.  The winter break of my first year in college marked the first time I ever put on hockey skates.  As I continued to slip and slide all over the rink, my best friend who I talked about earlier was flying around the rink (it was also his first time ice skating).  Granted, he did roller blade and there was probably some transfer going on there, but this isn’t about him and transfer, it is about the painful and arduous learning process I am currently going through.  When I think about learning how to skate, I am reminded of Fitts and Posner’s Three-Stage Model of Motor Learning.  This model of motor learning breaks the act of learning a motor task into 3 stages.  While the three stages occur on a spectrum and it can be difficult to conclusively distinguish when an individual is in a certain stage, each stage is independent of the other.  The first stage (Cognitive stage) is characterized by dramatic changes in performance from one trial to the next.  When I first started skating, I would fall on my butt so often that by the second day I was wearing two pairs of pants as well as snow pants to help cushion myself when I would fall.  Quickly though, I got the hang of skating and within about 3 days of skating I was no longer falling.  This drastic change in performance (falling a lot at first to not falling after a short period of time) is representative of the cognitive stage of learning.  The second stage (associative stage) occurs once the learner begins to get better at determining which strategy to use to best perform the task they are learning.  I would say that right now, I am in the associative stage because I am able to skate without falling, I can turn, I can stop, but I still have to constantly think about the act of skating in order to not fall.  Once I am able to skate flawlessly without having to think about where to place my feet/at what angle to place them at I will enter the third and final stage of Fitts and Posner’s Three-Stage Model of Motor Learning, the autonomous stage.  This ability to perform the task automatically results in a decreased need for attention toward performing the actual task itself.  If I am able to make it into the autonomous stage, that would mean I could focus more of my attention on the hockey puck and less time on staying off my butt.

This picture semi-accurately represents me during my first time learning to skate.  I had no clue how to stop and would often just skate into the boards in order to stop… sometimes I came in too hot and would flip over the boards upon impact.

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One activity I like to do in my free time is bowling.  It can especially be fun when my friends are all able to get out and go to the lanes late at night when they turn off the main lights and rely on the rave lights and glow in the dark solar system that’s pained on the wall for light.  When I was in the 5th grade, I entered my first (and last) bowling league.  Every day after school I would walk to the bowling alley and receive lessons on different aspects of bowling (e.g. how to properly line up, where to line up our feet, where to aim our ball, how to release the ball).  Something I didn’t end up learning about bowling until later in my life, was that different bowling alleys have different oil patterns on their lanes.  As seen in the picture, the Professional Bowlers Association (PBA) utilizes different oil patterns; the Cheetah, the Bear, and the Shark.  The important thing to note about oil patterns in bowling, is the effect it has on the ball.  While the ball is on a significant amount of oil, no amount of spin on the ball will make it spin in the alley (i.e. the ball will skid and continue in the same direction of the vector for which you released the ball).  As you can see with all three of the oil patterns, it gets lighter the farther down the lane you go.  This means that the farther down the lane you go, the less the oil will affect your ball.  This also means that the farther down the lane you go, the more your ball is able to physically act on the hardwood (not the oil) and start to move in the direction of the spin of your ball.  So, for example, if you were to throw a ball with a right-hand spin (ball is released on the right side of the lane and spins toward the center of the lane) on the Cheetah, the effect of the spin wouldn’t begin to happen until the ball gets about 33 feet down the lane.  Oil patterns are important to recognize while bowling because they can have such a large impact of your game.
Since recognizing the oil pattern at my hometown bowling alley (the Bear), my game has significantly changed.  I absolutely LOVE throwing my ball with spin and especially love when the ball just barely hugs the gutter for a split second before the spin brings it back into the pocket (the space between the 1 and 3 pin or the 1 and 2 pin (the sweet spot in bowling)).  My typical bowling pattern can be seen as the red line in the picture.  I often find that when I go to different bowling alley’s different oil patterns are used.  This change in oil pattern allows me the opportunity to work on developing a new schema.  Throughout the course of a game or two, I am able to use the results of each throw to figure out what throw is too hard or too soft, which throw has too much spin or too little, and which throw starts out in the right spot or wrong spot.  This schema allows me to match up my motor movements with a result which then, depending on the result, allows me to make adjustments if need be.  By the end of the game, a schema has usually been created and my bowling becomes significantly better than compared to my first few bowls on the lane with a new oil pattern.