Hit a Plateau

This week of my handstand practice felt more challenging than usual.  Although I am enjoying the practice and I love seeing the progress, I guess it is expected that the progress slows a little when you start to get more comfortable with any skill.  I think I have somewhat settled into a rut with my practice,  My sessions feel good and I can tell that I’m building more strength but I can’t seem to progress any further than about a six-second hold.

The plateau feels awful I want to improve but it is definitely feeling more difficult for some reason.  My wrists have also been feeling not too great, even though I started incorporating some wrist stretches before I practice there is still some strain and slight pain when I bend at certain angles.  I think that my training and practice has just come down to very small adjustments now that I can hopefully fix one by one in the next few weeks.  I am going to include a Youtube video I posted that shows the most recent clip of my handstand form and time held.  If anyone has any experience with handstands or gymnastics, I would love some feedback and criticisms!

Ever-Changing Landscape

Technology has become something that we all rely on in our day to day lives.  It has become something so needed that it actually becomes difficult to avoid it at times.  Not so long ago, when the landscape of online participation was just starting out, a lot of people didn’t think any media platforms would make any lasting changes to the world.  But along comes Youtube, which is now one of, if not the largest online sharing network in the world.  The atmosphere of Youtube, in the beginning, was so positive, people weren’t making money off of anything, they just posted what they enjoyed and everyone seemed to have fun with it.  But now that Youtube and Instagram are platforms for people to make a living out of, I feel like that underlying joy is gone; of course, there are still those who post videos or pictures who don’t get paid for it, and it feels like those people actually have the better experience with the platform.

Aside from regular life changing because of technology, schools experienced change as well.  As said in our class, anything new was considered new technology, for example, the blackboard when it was new was considered an educational technology even though there was nothing technological about it, it was just a change.  Teachers are now more than ever, having the difficult job of staying up to date with technology at the same pace, if not ahead of their students, I’m still a student and feel like I am already behind so I have some catching up to do.  There will be new changes to the classroom and educational technologies every few years and if the teacher can find ways to incorporate some of those technologies into the school day that’s great, but it isn’t going to be necessary to have every single new thing that comes out the second that it comes out.  I think that schools have done really good with adapting to new things fairly quickly, and that makes me think there shouldn’t be a problem looking ahead to the future of schools and teaching when it comes to how schools have been operating and are run.

Steady Progress

Since my last learning project post, I feel I have definitely gotten stronger and have started to gain more balanced overall.  For the first few days, almost a week of doing handstands my shoulders and upper back were extremely sore.  But now I can do a practice session and finish everything with little to no soreness which means I have gotten stronger and can practice for longer without fatigue.

I did start to notice a little bit of pain in my wrists from all the weight on them so I started incorporating a bit of a stretching and warm-up routine I do before and after I practice the actual handstands, it seems to be helping a little bit, but the pain might just be something normal I need to get used to.  After all my practice, so far the longest I’ve held a handstand was about six seconds, which is already such an improvement from where I started.  If I am going, to be honest though, it was a very shaky six seconds and it felt like forever, but ill keep getting stronger and improve on the form until I can get this right! Heres an updated picture on my form so far.

Twitter in The Classroom

I have come to learn that Twitter can be a great platform for communicating and sharing with friends and colleagues.  It has a very broad spectrum of interests to tailor your experience on the site and offers a lot of different ways people can get their news.  I actually created my twitter account for this class, I never had one before this and never really wanted one either.  And to be honest, I still don’t really like twitter all that much, it just feels like one more thing to think about during the day, and I really struggle to find things interesting enough to post about.  I don’t disagree with people saying that twitter is a good platform, I just don’t enjoy having one more social platform to be active on.

Participating in the SaskEdChat was very fun, and I met a few new people during it who were all educators, which could be a good resource in the future.  I can see twitter as a good resource for teachers and those people who are trying to build an online presence, but I do not see twitter as a good resource for an actual classroom.  I can’t seem to think of any way to use it in an elementary class other than sharing news, which a student can easily do, and probably already does on their own. I realize that this blog probably sounds very negative towards twitter, but that is not what I am trying to express.  I think twitter is good, but I don’t think its necessarily good for everything.

The Future of Teaching and Learning

Covid-19 has made many changes to how we live our daily lives.  The one area that has been changed almost completely is schooling.  When it comes to schools and learning I don’t see any way that it will ever totally go back to normal, the idea of distance learning and blended learning for students has become somewhat of a norm in these times, which in some ways is a good thing.  In the fall, at least for most universities, I feel that schools will try to limit face to face classes as much as possible, but, as a student whose plan was to be in a school placement in the fall, I am hoping there will be at least some in-person classes so that I can complete what I need to.

The goal that I see is that within the year everything will be back to normal and we can all go on how we used to, but if we have to think rationally that is a very slim outcome.  As I had said earlier the most likely outcome is a sort of blended learning environment, where maybe students do not come to school every day and instead they only come three days a week and then do some other classes online like we are doing now.  Five years is a long time, and a lot can change.  I believe more blended and online learning is something to be expected in the future of schools.

The Start of my Learning Project

To begin my learning project I was not sure about what I was wanting to do and had to think about it for a while.  All I knew was that I wanted to learn something related to fitness and so at first, I wanted to learn how to backflip.  needless to say after about thirty minutes of “practice” and watching videos trying to figure it out, I decided I didn’t want to break my neck, so I settled for handstands.  I have very average balancing skills so it is something I thought would be good to work on.  I got the inspiration to do handstands from an Instagram personality who is famous for her fitness and extreme ability to control her body balance and strength.  This Instagrammer also posts tutorials on her youtube channel about the steps towards handstands and tips for how to better your balance, strengthen your shoulders, as well as a lot of stretches you can do before and after practice.  I want to document at least some of my progress but I forgot to record my starting point a few days ago, but let me just tell you… it was not very good.  According to the person I am following on how to do a handstand, you can officially do a handstand when you can hold it freely without any help for 10 full seconds.  And so far 3 seconds of being upside down feels like forever.  Even after only a few days I already feel like I am getting better so hopefully, I can do it in time for this assignment.

EDTC 300 Introduction

Hello everyone! My name is Lochlin and I will be going into my third year of middle years education in the fall 2020 semester. I have had such great experiences in the faculty of education in the last few years and have made some awesome friends along the way as well. A little about myself, I am a very active person and like getting outside to do activities or go to the gym! although at the moment, unfortunately, I am stuck with home workouts instead. I am from Moose Jaw Saskatchewan but during the school year, I live with some roommates in Regina. And just the other day we went into Regina looking for houses to rent and we ended up signing a lease on a place of our own! I know that for most of you reading this that isn’t very interesting, but my roommates and I are very excited to be more independent and have a place of our own!

I actually have very little experience with social media and technologies that can be utilized in an educational setting. I have never had a twitter account, so I was a little bit hesitant about having to make one for this class. I don’t have Facebook either so I find that I don’t really have anything to base my experience off of, the only social media I have is an Instagram account and the reason I chose not to get any others is that I find that I spend too much time on Instagram and I do not want to be spending more time on other social media platforms. But, with that being said I do now have a twitter account and if anyone from class would like to follow me I will put a link to my page here. I have actually dealt with very little technology in a classroom, the most I have experienced was in a grade one class I observed in my first year and that technology was basically just iPads and a smartboard projector, so I am excited about this class and learning how and what other things I can use in a class!

This is a picture from that grade one class in my first year of me and my field partner with these awesome kids!

(P.S I did get permission from the teacher to post this picture if I wanted to)

My name is Lochlin Winterton, and this is my blog page! I started this blog for schooling purposes at the U of R. I am in the teacher education program, and I am eager to get into the field of teaching in the next few years.

Blog #10: Curriculum as Numeracy

Going through school math was always my weakest subject, I really struggled with concepts and ideas presented in the form of problems and equations. As I progressed through the years I fell further and further behind in mathematics, and this led to a lot of problems for me by the time I got to grade 6. But, the 6th grade was the year that things got turned around for me, there was an excellent staff at my school and they really cared about how I was doing and so my teacher met with my mother and gave her all the workbooks from grade 6-8 for me to work on at home with help. After a little while I was back on track and actually a little bit ahead for the first time in my life which felt great. All the years leading up to the 6th grade I felt awful about my math skills and because I did not understand right away I got lost and felt like the teacher and the class left me behind in the lessons. I know there were also a few other students that had the same problems I did, but unfortunately later did not have the same teacher I did that helped me so they never really caught up. For the longest time me and a few other kids felt like we were not as important in the classroom just because we weren’t moving along as=t the same speed as the others.

A few of the Inuit ways of learning math that stand out to me as challenging Eurocentric ideas are that the Inuit have a mainly oral form of teaching, meaning they don’t rely on paper or a board at the front of class to teach what they need to teach. Using their body parts for measuring is another great difference because it is something concrete younger children can see in front of them rather than just being told how long something is they can see it for themselves. The last thing I would like to point out is that rather than use a base 10 counting system the use base 20, it seems that most of the world uses the base 10 and it is a usually agreed upon counting system but the Inuit people do things differently and that shows that there doesn’t have to b just one way of doing things in life. It is possible to have different ways of doing regular things that will still work the same as the “norm” way of doing it.