Welcome to my final roller-skating in-depth post!
Progress Update:
I have been having a lot of fun with my in-depth during the past four weeks. With nice weather, there are more spaces I can go to practice my skating. This is because skating on wet surfaces can be a safety hazard, so I stay in undercover areas. Nice weather can also make it more enjoyable to be spending time outside on roller skates.
In the past weeks, I have been able to get out to a tennis court not far from my house to practice in and it was a really great place to skate at. The area was larger and less bumpy than where I usually practice during. I was able to see how much I have improved with more space to go faster and turn around easily.
In the past weeks, I was working on a couple of different skills. The first skill that I feel like I got a handle on since my last post was my weight-shifting/turning skills. I feel much better about being able to avoid obstacles and snake back and forth now that I have had more practice with it.
Another skill I have been working to improve is going backwards. I made some attempts to do it before a meeting with my mentor because I knew it was a similar strategy to learning how to go forward, but I had some struggles with it. After talking with my mentor, she pointed out some ways I could improve it though that I can now apply when I practice.
In the last couple of weeks, I have been really getting the basics of roller skating down. This combined with feeling much more comfortable on my skates means that I can start trying more tricks that build off the basic skills I already know.
How to Have a Beautiful Mind:
Concepts:
The overall big concept of every meeting with my mentor is to learn how to skate It is hard to have a definition for ‘knowing how to skate’ though. I think right now the focus concept of this meeting was the basics of roller skating. Even in that concept though there are smaller concepts that we have been going over as we get more into it. Concepts that I’ve already learned in past meetings are ways to go forward, ways to stop and how to be safe while you are skating.
One concept that was a bigger focus of this week’s meeting was ways to move backwards. One of the first skills I had a challenge with was doing bubbles backwards. Know that I have been practicing it since the start of my project it comes very easily to me. Something that my mentor mentioned would happen when we were talking about the new way to move backwards, I was working on. “That’s how it starts. I promise you one day it will suddenly click and it will just come naturally after that.”
There is also the concept of how I build towards being comfortable with those skills. Lots of the skills I’ve done in skating so far have similar ideas for how to get to a place where they feel easy. The skill that I had learned that related to how I learned how to move backward was of course forward. “It was the same thing when you were learning to go forwards just little steps at a time.” These two skills shared the same concept of starting with smaller shifts from foot to foot that would eventually lead to being able to do larger glides. The only difference was a change in foot position.
Alternatives:
So far, I have found that roller skating is a skill with so many possibilities. This makes it a great activity for have alternatives. There are not only many different options for tricks to learn but also ways to learn those tricks. “There are so many things out there to try. No matter what difficulty it is they are great to encourage you to try.” We were discussing what the options were for what to learn know that I have been feeling good about some of the base skills we have learned so far.
One part of that idea that involves having alternatives is when it comes to choosing moves that are more difficult. The way that we would approach that usually is by finding alternative skills that involve parts of the tricks and practicing those until we can piece them together. That way of practicing is an alternative to diving straight into a more difficult move. “If you already have that one the other one will come easily.” My mentor was talking about the fact that I knew one way to move backwards so getting comfortable with the next would be easier because of that.
When it comes to moves that don’t build off of another like the basic skills we were starting with my mentor was helpful with finding different options when one way wasn’t working. An example of this was recently when I was learning how to glide backwards. The first way she suggested was taking little steps backwards with my skates in the right shape. The other option was trying to shift back and forth with the skates in the correct shape. I found that it was helpful that I had an alternative to the first one because I found when I was taking steps my feet would begin to drift apart making it more difficult. “If you were to try leaning back and forth more then it won’t be a matter of picking up your feet more shifting weight.” My mentor was very helpful because she explained the way that the different strategies could help with the difficulties I was having.
Final Product:
Roller skating isn’t something that creates a material product so for my learning center I wanted to show people the progress I have made and explain the way I have done that. I have been taking video evidence since the first time I put on my skates to be able to compare. I want to not just show that beginning and the final product though I want to show and explain the process in-between.
I will do this by putting together a video with comparisons of the videos from different stages of my learning of different skills. I want to explain the process of what I’m doing and why I am doing with the actual videos of my project so people can get a better idea of how I approached learning how to roller skate. My video will likely contain parts about the actual skates and how to be safe with them, some base skills that I learned during the project, and one of the more difficult tricks that I was working towards. I will also have a part about different kinds of skating so people could find out what kind of roller skating could be interesting to them.
Video:
Here is a clip from when I was able to get out to a bigger space for skating:
Thanks for reading!