Learning on the court

I’ve always been deemed too short for basketball. I’ve always been less than 5’3 with a terrible vertical, so it’s easy for me to understand why I’ve never played basketball. Well, until recently. All of my life, I have played many different sports. It’s no surprise that I can describe myself as athletic. I’ve played high school and college tennis, middle school volleyball and even other sports. Basketball has never been an option that I’ve taken, until now. A couple of nights ago, I played my first basketball game, ever. To summarize it, I’ll call it a “learning experience” because that’s all I did. I learned a new sport at an extremely quick pace. To be honest I probably wasn’t much help to my team, whom I suspect have all played basketball before, and it also didn’t help that I showed up late due to work. By the time I had literally ran/jogged from work, the game had already started, the captain’s meeting had passed, my team had decided on some numerical defense strategy, and I was lost, but that’s ok. I wasn’t expecting to be MVP on my first night on the intermural team, and I wasn’t. I really wasn’t. I missed shots, I couldn’t remember who to block, I barely understood our strategy, and if I was lucky I could manage to get the ball to another teammate. As much as I could tell at the beginning of the game, my job was to run and be some type of distraction. I could do that. I can’t imagine that all of this confusion sounds like something that would make me want to play another game, but somewhere in this mess, I was learning. My first step on the court: I just had someone tell me where to stand. I had no clue what a 3-2 defense was. My last step on the court: I could tell you what defense we were trying to run, I could track where my teammates were and I understood not all, but at least more of what my teammates were yelling to me. Somewhere in the confused mess I had learned what my part of the team was, and a little bit more about basketball, and it was fun. A blast! Honestly. I may have been sore, extremely tired, and had more questions than answers, but that was only my first game. Going into a sports game and having no clue what you are doing is confusing. There it is, plain and simple. You have to learn at a rapid rate, try and make mistakes (not on purpose, but those things happen), and attempt to figure out what is going on. There is a fluidity in the learning. You barely notice that you are learning, but at the few moments of clarity, you look up and realize that all by yourself you are standing in the right place. Beyond the enjoyment of running for a purpose, as opposed to running on a treadmill, those moments of clarity bring a small satisfaction that has me running back to the court for my next game. Maybe next time, I will learn even more. That’s something wonderful about learning outside a classroom, sometimes you don’t even realize that you have learned something, you are simply striving to do something correctly, or in my case block the next ball. Learning on a court, in the middle of a game, is fluid; it’s organic. You don’t have a lot of time to constantly question things, you can’t take notes (running with a pencil and notebook= not safe and probably extremely challenging), and you have to make mistakes in the moment and move on. There is no studying. There is practice, and most of all, there is fun in learning something new. Hopefully, my next game will be more of a learning experience than the last one. Who knows? We could even win the next game…

                         What's so funny?                          

This week my group (Audrey Laker, Johnny Barfield, and Kit Snyder) each interviewed 1 person about different aspects of humor. 

Audrey's Interview

Johnny's Interview

Kit's Interview

Literature and Civilization defined

              WISDOM FROM THE HONORS COMMUNITY

I asked three people from the honors community what they thought literature and civilization was. I also asked them what a course entitled Literature and Civilization would cover.