Tag: school

Overlap

I seem to find myself in this position every year… Finishing up one sport while just starting another. It’s a hectic time, but it’s pretty fun to be doing two sports at once! One day I’m training for USASA Boardercross Nationals, and the next I’m running and jumping, preparing for the next track meet (which is tomorrow, in this case).

Around this time last year, I was in the same position – getting ready to race on both snowboards and the track. But this year is slightly different – Different, because I’m now in high school and running track for Summit High School, and preparing for boardercross planning to advance out of a few heats.

The biggest part of managing two major sports at a time is definitely time management, and that’s one area where I’m improving in, but I still need to work on. I occasionally work on homework until well past 10 PM, having only previously completed only a bit of the work. I’m attempting to limit distractions and complete some of my homework earlier than a day or two before the due date to account for sleep. However, after a long, quotidian day of school, it’s hard to come home and continue working. It’s much easier to just go to Woodward with friends, watch a movie with family or simply sleep. But that’s where I’m working to force myself just to do the work, and then backflip/watch a movie/sleep afterwards.

Tomorrow I will race in the first track meet of the high school season, and I’m both nervous and excited. It will be the first meet where I won’t be competing in my main event (high jump), not to mention the first meet where I will race people older than me with far superior skills. But, you never know, I still could somehow finish in the top 8, earning me a podium and earning the team a couple of points. I’ll be competing in the 4×100, 4×200, 200m and Long Jump, which are all events I’ve run before in meets (minus long jump, but I’ve done that plenty of times). If I had to guess, I’d say I have the best shot in either the 4×100 or the Long Jump, where I think I at least have a shot at making the top 8.

And then, of course, I return to snowboard training the day after. Coming from sprinting and jumping all day, I just hope I’ll have enough energy to get down the mountain awake. In other news, I threw some backflips the other day at copper, and I was fortunate enough to have my coach film me, and you can view it below.

Nationals is only 16 days away, which is still crazy. It feels like the season has flown by, and it’s almost time to start editing together a season edit! Although it feels to me that the season has gone so quickly, I feel like I’ve accomplished almost everything I wanted to this season (except, however, for landing a 720. Well, after nationals is over, I’m going to attempt a few). I’ve landed 540’s, backflips, slopestyle runs, and four top 5 competition finishes, with three of them getting me onto the podium. What’s left? A good result at the National Championships. And then it’s off to the races, swapping out my snowboard for a pair of spikes.

Freedom to Learn

If you have read any of my past blog posts, you’ve noticed that I mention one reason that I don’t particularly like going to school is the whole freedom-limiting aspect. But what do I mean by that? Let me articulate and expand upon one aspect this vague idea that I refer to over and over again – Freedom to Learn.

Working at a coffee shop two years ago with Isaac and Jadyn while my parents attended an event.
Working at a coffee shop two years ago with Isaac and Jadyn while my parents attended an event.

In my mind, homeschooling was a synonym for freedom. I could look up anything I wanted, any time of the day. I’d take breaks every once in a while to research a topic or an idea that I had wanted to know about, and occasionally write about them, such as this post from a while ago that I wrote about various phobias. I simply was interested in the hilarious and unique names for different phobias that I didn’t even know existed. As a result, I discovered the name of the one phobia I had and currently have: Ichthyophobia, or the irrational fear of fish. It’s always been a weird aspect of myself, as I’m not irrationally scared of anything else, and I’d rather have spiders crawl over me than jump into a lake with a fish. Anyways, back to the topic at hand.

I learned a lot more than just that, though. Every once in a while, I’d randomly stop my work and go learn something, some of which turned out to be beneficial to me later in life. Once, when I was learning Pre-Algebra through Khan Academy, I decided I wanted to learn basic trigonometry. So, I switched out of the Pre-Algebra tab and selected the Trig course. After an hour of work, I ingrained in my brain the trig functions and their uses. At the time, mom thought that although I was learning, I should be getting back to my actual work. Turns out, all that work wasn’t for nothing… Recently, in my Geometry class, we’ve been learning the basics of Trig, and my prior knowledge of the subject allowed me to drift off and rest in class for a few days and not miss anything I didn’t already know.

As I learned new things, I found myself memorizing things with only a few minutes of practice, which helped my acquisition of knowledge greatly. I can still recite 40 digits of Pi after not practicing for over a year (3.14159265358979323846… I’m not going to continue that), remember exactly what pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis is and how to pronounce it, and list off my favorite cryptids (I did a two part post about this in 2014, which you can read here).

My point is, while school provides many new ideas to ponder and write about, it’s limited in that the teachers and administration choose what I learn, rather than myself. I learned so much from homeschooling that wasn’t actually part of my curriculum, such as how to make money from YouTube, the best buying and selling prices of various iPhones on eBay, or how to create my own non-electric, non-steerable and wood-made go-cart (Yes, I did that, and it was extremely fun being pulled by a friend on a bike down the street, racing against other kids).

And so it begins…

The first week of public school, that is. I’ve never wanted to sleep more so bad. It’s been a long week, and I know that it will just be one of many long weeks,  but right now I see it as a turning point in my life. A 180-degree turn straight into the ground – I mean, the best thing that’s happened to me since we started traveling.

Okay, so it’s obviously not either of those extremes. It’s actually not that bad. I’m taking two online classes, and most of my classes are either easy or I enjoy them minus biology.  The teachers are really nice, and I enjoy learning what they have to teach. Soccer’s been tough, with practice directly after school, till 5:45, every day. So basically, my stereotypical schedule will be waking up at 6, getting to school at 7:30, staying in school till 3, going to soccer from 3-6, and then going to dinner. I’ll be detailing my first week of public school in the next post.

 

Birth of Britain Ch 1: Chapter 1…

Let’s hope you consider this funny and interesting.

Everyone loves a narration completely for school with no enjoyment in me writing it, right? I’ll try and make it short, not extremely boring and quick. 😛

Churchill explains (for this book is written by him) that a lot of the pre-historic human skeletons were found in none other than Atlantis
Britain. He says the Iron Age overlaps with the late Bronze Age, when men came and killed the bronze-wielding Britons with Iron stuff….

Caesar goes and meets the Britons, who claim to be aboriginal. He attacks them, failing and damaging his ships. He makes some observations about their lifestyle, such as their houses being similar to the Gauls, their chariot fighting and their clothing. He takes some of them captive back to Rome, and returns, only to have his ships destroyed again.

You think he would stop, right? No? Ok then, you’re right. He keeps attacking, until he gets defeated by the great Cassivellaunus, who was very great at winning, because he was a winner, and that’s what winners do. Caesar runs back to Rome, and the islands are safe…. At least until CHAPTER 2, ATTACK OF THE REALLY LONG CHAPTERS….. 😛