The First Week of Ordinary Time (Part I)

As I switch up the style of this blog for the New Year, I think an appropriate first post would be to give a glimpse of what a normal work week looks like for me. Going into the JVC year, I thought I would be spending a majority of my time devoted to an after-school program at Cahokia High School. I spent my first week familiarizing myself with this program by reading the grant and all the regulations, and going to the High School and observing and participating on site. That changed after a conversation with my boss Fred about my past work experience and future plans. He felt that the after school program would not be the best fit for me or the YMCA to make the most of my year there.

The YMCA recently re-branded itself with the new slogan “For Youth Development, For Healthy Living, For Social Responsibility”. Everything I do at the Y applies to this in some way or another. Every week, Mondays and Tuesdays are the days that I am both the most excited and nervous about. On those days I play PE teacher. Two of the elementary schools in the Cahokia School District have dropped PE from their daily schedules, but they have a partnership to send their students to the Y to do an hour PE class. So on Mondays and Tuesdays I have anywhere between 70-100 students from 1^st-8^th grade at the same time with minimal help from teachers for supervision or participation and one or two other Y staff to help implement the class. I designed the program into four six-week sessions in which we do drills related to football, soccer, ultimate Frisbee, and baseball. On most weeks, I have a general idea of what type of game I want to play to address the different aspects of the game (dribbling around cones for soccer, route running or dogging tackler drills for football) and decide how to play those games a few hours before hand.

As someone who likes to make grand plans, I have thoroughly enjoyed this aspect of my job. But, at the same time I have learned that I need to keep things as simple as possible so that such a large amount of kids (and very young ones at that) can understand and participate. I have to really thing through even simple concepts such as keep-away to explain that the person in the middle should be energetic, get up in the face and guard the person with the ball, and not be lethargic and stationary in the middle. I believe I am learning lessons from this experience as well, as I learn to adapt on the fly as my plans almost certainly never work out exactly how I think them up (which is something I have had to get used to as I used to be much more upset when things wouldn’t go according to plan). I have also learned it isn’t the end of the world with an activity “fails”, and that I shouldn’t be afraid to having things go wrong. I believe that we ultimately learn more from mistakes than we do from successes.

I also feel as if I am growing more confident speaking and working in front of a large group of people. ( I have 80ish kids every week that I have to be in front of). At first I struggled with this and was not completely sure of myself. (Those of you who know me know that I have never really been one to dominate a classroom, social or other setting). This year is helping me to not think so much and to simply go with it. I have gained the confidence to lead partly from participating along with the kids in push-ups, jumping jacks, running activities, etc. I think I have gained their respect as they have become much more responsive and active in participation and I don’t t have to coax them as much to do things.

All of this was on display during this week, the first week back. I wanted to begin my Ultimate Frisbee unit with the kids, but found out that we still do not have the Frisbees to do this. So I thought “these kids have been on Christmas break for the last couple weeks with no school, they have been bouncing off the walls eating cookies all day (or maybe that was just me), I’m going to do a lot of running today”. So I ended up having them do all sorts of relay races running from one cone across the gym to another to do different fitness things like jumping jacks, push-ups, etc. Other races involved running backwards, high-knees, etc. It was also the first time I was completely by myself with all the kids, as the other Y staff person who does the program with me was with the junior. high kids. I was able to get and hold their attention and they got really into the relay races and had a lot of fun. I ended up sore and worn out as both I and the kids got a good workout from all the running. It was a good sore though and I believe I started the New Year off on a good note.

Tune in next week for a glimpse into the rest of my week at the Y.