Hi, welcome to my second blog post!

Progress Update:

Since my lasts post I have really started getting into my skill roller skating. I started with an online resource that my mentor recommended for getting started along with meeting with my mentor. I have been able to stick to my schedule for achievements easily and might even be ahead of schedule for some skills. I am also really enjoying my in-depth skill so far so I think I will be able to stay motivated for the project and be excited about it. The skills that I am working on right now are pretty much the basics or foundation of roller skating. My mentor and the online resources have taught me how to fall, stand, skate and stop. I have been practicing those skills and kept videos of my improvement for my final project.

Something I might want to change about my project now is the timeline. I think I will be able to have more time to learn more extra skills (tricks, types of skating, etc.). This is because the actual skating part is going faster than I anticipated which is a positive problem from my point of view. I also realized while getting more

How to Have a Beautiful Mind:

Agreeing:

I think agreeing was one of the easiest one of the three chapters for me to really notice. I found that it was very easy for me to agree with my mentor. I think that was because the discussions we were having were about practicing and learning skating and she has spent a lot of time in her career finding out what are the best ways to teach and learn roller skating.

Although it was easy to agree I still wanted to think of the reasoning. It’s very important to have a good process of learning something when you start something new. That way you can learn it in the quickest way and in a way that makes it easy to build more skills off of.

One example of this is in our conversation on what to learn first. You might think that standing up or even moving is the first lesson you should learn. That wasn’t the first skill I learned. The first skill that my mentor taught me was how to fall. Before I even put on my skates, we learned the safest ways to prevent falling and the safest ways to fall when it’s already too late. When I thought about this it made a lot of sense. It was such a smart way to start because once I started moving around and stopping, I had the skills to stable myself.  I even had a successful fall which was fine because of my safety gear and prior falling training.

One part of this chapter that I think I could add more of was doing less agreeing. I’m not saying that I should disagree just for the sake of disagreeing that would be the opposite of helpful. What I think I could do instead is when I find myself doing too much agreeing I could try adding the reasons I agree. Just adding something related to show why I agree would make the conversation more interesting and less repetitive.

Disagreeing:

I found this chapter was harder to reflect on my conversation with. A lot of it was about you thinking that someone might be wrong or have the wrong reasoning, but I didn’t find myself having that during our conversations.

During our conversations, she would start with a skill and then explain the best way for me to learn it. Not only that she would also go over the reasoning for the process of learning it. This made it easy to understand her reasoning and therefore easy to agree with.

There was only really one time during our lessons that I wasn’t too sure about why I would need to learn a skill. This was when she said it was important that I kept my head up while I skated. I had some struggle with that and felt like I should be checking what my feet are doing while I’m skating. She later explained the reasoning for this, and it made a lot of sense. She explained that it’s important to have your head up for better balance and to see where you’re going.

Differing:

I found that differing came a little easier to me than full out disagreeing. Differing for me didn’t mean that I thought what we were learning was wrong it just meant that I might have thought we would have tried something else first.

I think that differing would even sometimes be good for the conversation. Being able to go through ideas for skills to learn and ways to learn them and the way we would both approach it could lead to an even better way to learn something. When differing is done respectfully it even would make the conversation more interesting.

              There was one part of our lesson that there was a little bit of differing. After we learned how to fall, we were doing some stopping and she talked about how it could be better to have practiced without skates first. I think that it was good that we jumped into it though because I have already done the going over foot positioning before we had our meeting and was really to get rolling. This situation was differing because there would never be a right answer. I could argue both ways but in the end, I’m sure whichever way we went with it would have been okay because I was learning something.

 

Okay, thanks for reading! I’ve had lots of fun so far!