Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving, a tradition that started in the sixteen hundreds, is still a holiday in America today. Thanksgiving started when the Plymouth colonists and the Wampanoag Indians shared a harvest feast. It wasn’t until the eighteen hundreds that Thanksgiving was declared to be a National holiday, celebrated in November. Since then, its traditions have become a part of every family in the U.S.

Ok, this boring blog is going personal. Over Thanksgiving, I drove around 14 hours and to visit my relatives from both sides of the family. It’s kind of funny how much these two families differ. My relatives on my mom’s side are more of everyday people. My uncle is a security person who works for the government and my aunt runs a cleaning business. All of my cousins are pretty much my age, give or take a few years. That grandma’s house is smallish and kind of cramped creating a very hectic Thanksgiving Day.

The relatives on my dad’s side are very different. One of my uncles is in charge of a company that owns a lot of buildings and he travels all over the world promoting different products. Another uncle is the CEO and CFO of a major bank and lives in orange county California. I have yet another uncle on that side and he is a plastic surgeon that owns his own practice and a spa besides. Even though they are rather well-off, they grew up on a farm so they are actually very down to Earth people. My cousins on that side of the family are a hoot. The oldest of them is three years younger than me and there are about six kids younger than her. I think the youngest is three. We always meet at our lake and spend the Saturday after Thanksgiving together.

Let me assure you, two Thanksgivings are plenty. Not that I don’t enjoy the varying company, because I do, but I am so tired after break that it is not even funny. I also come back home with a full belly having eaten enough food to feed the kids in Africa.

Sleep Deprivation

                Falling asleep in lectures, hitting the snooze button multiple times in the mornings, the tell-all dark circles around your eyes…sound familiar? According to a Maas, Power Sleep Quiz, these are all symptoms of sleep deprivation. In AP Psych, we learned ALL about sleep and how much everyone should have. I personally think it's funny that people don't expect teenagers to be sleep deprived. I mean, think about it, everything we do is just meant to keep us awake.

                If we want to improve ourselves for college and juice up our college resumes, we take more AP classes and work hard to get good grades, especially if you are in your junior or beginning of senior year of high school. Teachers assign a whole lot of homework in AP classes and if you are taking more than one…good luck living life. Don't get me wrong, it does depend on the classes and if you choose to brush it off but it all eventually accumulates, creating a very long night of studying.

                Social network sites, television, and even music are all distracting to us. I will definitely admit that I spend way too much time on the computer when I have homework. I think the problem is that they are just so addicting to be on and so much more fun than doing the assigned homework. Even hormones in teenage bodies keep us awake longer.

                College kids are even worse. My sister is currently in college and I think she gets around four hours of sleep or less on a normal day. It's simply unhealthy, and then people wonder why college kids resort to drugs, a lot of them having an intended purpose to keep the student awake longer. Who knew that  trying to promote schoolwork also promoted drug use?

                I think that the simple fix to all of this is to tell teachers to limit the amount of homework they give out. If they don't assign as much, then students will get more sleep and actually pay attention in class. I'm sure the teachers would appreciate also the lack of dozing heads lying on desks.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, A Novel, review until page 278

            The last books I read, The Help and Water For Elephants were stories that dealt with America in the past. This is a definite change because it is not centered in America at all. It takes place in Sweden, probably because it was written by a Swedish author. This makes the book a lot more challenging because a lot of the language and names of places are Swedish or Swedish based. Since I am not familiar with the country, I found myself having to look up the locations of places mentioned in the book. I really enjoyed the authors descriptions of Sweden and the adventures he chooses to take his characters on. I think he adds a lot of depth to his characters.

            I can't say that I have read it completely, because I am only about half-way through. From what I can see though, the books starts painfully slow and gets a lot better as you keep reading. The characters in the novel really come alive and I have gotten more and more familiar with them.

            I enjoy that this book is kind of like a mystery, or investigation, or at least along those lines. I haven't really ever read a book like this before and it really sparks my interest. It took me a while to really get "hooked" but I can tell you that I have been reading this book a lot lately, aside from the past week due to finals. I chose this book because I had heard a lot of good reviews about and I will be sure to tell you if I recommend it to others, although at the rate its going now, I don't think that I will give it a bad review.

            I will be sure to update my review of this book after I finish reading it and I will be sure to repost it.

What Is Learned During Swim Lessons

In my last blog post, I talked about what a WSA and WSI was and what my experience was while learning to be one. In this post, I will talk about what an instructor actually does when they teach the lessons and what they have to deal with.

As I said previously, I had no idea what to do when I started teaching lessons. We were given lessons plans and progress checks but I found myself asking the other instructors A LOT about what I had to do, and how to teach certain skills. It took a lot of trial and error, and I send my apologies to very first class because that was mostly my error part.

Some of the skills we are supposed to teach in level one include how to enter the water, blowing bubbles in the water, teaching them supported back and front floats, and the arm and leg actions of swimming. Level one is basically to get the kids a lot more comfortable with the water and prepare them for the entry-level skills in level two.

The skills in level two basically add on to level one and this is where parents will see their kids start to actually swim and float on their own. Children in level three need to learn how to do their front and back floats on their own, as well as front and back glides. They also need to learn how to swim. Their method in swimming turns out more like a very basic stroke but it keeps them floating for the next level.

                Level three is basically stroke refinement. In this level, the instructors review the swimmers skills from level two and add on to them. Swimmers will be taught rotary breathing, back crawl, and basic dives. In the class I taught, we learned sitting dives, kneeling dives, and standing dives in the deep end. We would usually do this at the end of class for something fun to do. The last levels are more stroke refinement and just improving on the swimmers skills. There are also courses in level five where you can learn dives, and lifeguard skills. (366)

WSA Experience

            In some of my older blogs, I talked about what it took to be a lifeguard and the people at the pool. Another thing that people may not know about lifeguards is that we actually teach swim lessons as well.

            Some people choose to become WSIs which stands for water safety instructor. WSIs are trained specifically for teaching swim lessons. I am not a WSI but I am a WSA or a water safety assistant. WSAs and WSIs are trained in basically the same thing, and do the same things, but WSIs are able to pass kids in swim lessons and get paid more. WSIs are able to get paid up to fifteen dollars an hour if they teach a private lesson but they got paid around 9.50 for group lessons at my pool.

           

            My WSA training pretty much consisted of us learning what to do with each age group and what each level or age group is like to teach. After the training, we were required to watch someone teach a lesson and then help co-teach a lesson with our own lesson plan.

           

            My pool was kind of short of guards to teach lessons so I really only watched one lesson being taught and was then assigned to teach my own lesson. My first day was a disaster. I taught level ones who were all around three and four years old. One of my kids was extremely rowdy and I wasn’t really sure how to control him. He ended up crossing the pool a lot of times. After my first few times of teaching lessons, I learned how to control the kids a lot better and control my schedule a lot better. At the end of the season I had improved a great deal and was actually very good at it.

           

            Throughout my lifeguarding season, I taught around six lessons in four sessions of the swim lessons. I taught five level one classes and one level three class. As I said before, the level ones were almost all three to five years old and my level threes were around seven years old. My experiences teaching swim lessons improved a lot of my skills involving children and it was overall a pretty good experience but sometimes got to be a little stressful and exhausting. (386)

Review of Water for Elephants, a novel, by Sara Gruen

            After previously reading The Help which was centered in the early 1960's, Water for Elephants took me back even further in time to the early 1930's. This is a great story that retells  the life of a man in a train-pulled circus. It is filled with drama, love, hate, abuse, and problems faced during the depression. By choosing to write in this time frame and about this type of circus, the author was able to add a lot more interest I think than if she had written about a circus in present times.

            Gruen uses more popular diction than not, making the book easier to read. Each of the characters in the book uses their own dialogue. The performers have their own language as well as the working men. Some of the content is probably for an older audience, I guess if it was a movie it would probably get a pg-13 rating.

            The book basically has two main sections, a story of an old man named Jacob Jankowski as well as a section of the same man when he was younger and in the circus. When I started reading the book, I was a little confused on what the story of the old man, and then the man in the circus related to. It was not until the first few chapters that I figured out what was going on. I was pleased to find that the two stories connected at the end.

            I think I fell in love with the book not only because of the storyline but also because of the depth. Because the author wrote two parts to the story, the old man and his younger self, I think it really added depth and created empathy for the old man. Even though I thought the old man was pointless at the beginning, I figured out what his purpose was which really tied the book together for me.

            Like the The Help, this book was also exceptional. I was blown away by how emotionally attached I got to the characters and their experiences. I would absolutely recommend this book to everyone (again, probably over thirteen) because it is phenomenal and so cleverly written.

Review of The Help by Kathryn Stockett

             I usually read books that center around the twenty-first century so reading The Help was a refreshing change. In this book Stockett illuminates the harshness of living in Mississippi during the 1980s. She does so by telling the stories of three different characters; two colored maids and a persevering white woman writer. By choosing characters from this time-frame and education she was able to write the book in a way that is relatable to most readers. Although the slang is dated to that time, Stockett keeps the dialogue simple and easy to understand which makes the story more genuine and personal in my opinion.

            Overall the book is not extremely challenging. Of course, it is in no way an easy book to read and I wouldn't recommend it to younger than high school readers, but the author was able to write it in more of a popular diction. Even thought the wording was not entirely challenging, I did find myself rereading parts of the book to get a better understanding.

            In the beginning of the book, I found it a bit challenging to keep track of each of the characters because they switch off every few chapters. It also made it kind of difficult to really connect with who they were. As the book progressed however, the characters became more clear and pronounced and I got used to the style of writing. I found it interesting how each character, seemingly unrelated to each other at the beginning, began to get tied in with each other's stories.

            It didn’t take long before I could admit that I was in love with this book.  The story was interesting and it was an entirely new setting compared to my usual book choices. The more I read, the more hooked I got to the characters, the plot, and the lifestyle of the people in the "Old South." After finishing the book, I agree with the authors choice to switch the characters. By showing the different views and thoughts of completely different people really added depth and made the book more addictive. I would absolutely recommend this to everyone, it is fantastic.