Professional Portfolio

NASPE Standard 1
Standard 1: Demonstrates competency in motor skills and movement patterns needed to perform a variety of physical activities.
Scientific and Theoretical Knowledge - Physical education teacher candidates know and apply discipline-specific scientific and theoretical concepts critical to the development of physically educated individuals.
Although I do not have documentation to post on here I have taken many classes that have given me knowledge in the motor skills. For example motor development, Anatomy and physiology 1 and 2, and Biomechanics, in the upcoming spring semester I will be taking motor behavior, and Exercise Physiology to help give me more knowledge.

NASPE Standard 2
Standard 2: Demonstrates understanding of movement concepts, principles, strategies, and tactics as they apply to the learning and performance of physical activities.
Skill and Fitness Based Competence - Physical education teacher candidates are physically educated individuals with the knowledge and skills necessary to demonstrate competent movement performance and health enhancing fitness as delineated in the NASPE K – 12 Standards.
This standard I feel was demonstrated in my squash lesson I put up index cards in tactical positions for the serve so the ball would land in good spots to win the point. I got these tactical ideas from my racket activities lesson where they teach us several affective serves.

NASPE Standard 3
Standard 3: Participates regularly in physical activity.
Planning and Instruction - Physical education teacher candidates plan and implement developmentally appropriate learning experiences aligned with local state, and national standards to address the diverse needs of all students.
This lesson plan that I used for teaching ice-skating is a great example of an implementation of Standard 3, but also provides fun examples of how to make ice skating easy and enjoyable for your students.

NASPE Standard 4
Standard 4: Achieves and maintains a health-enhancing level of physical fitness.
Instructional Delivery and Management - Physical education candidates use effective communication and pedagogical skills and strategies to enhance student engagement and learning.
In my short life all I have done is athletics. I live for and love being physically fit and hope that one day I will be able to inspire students suffering from obesity to do the same. I am currently registered for the 2010 NYC Marathon on November 7 where I will be running for the A Running Start foundation which raises money for Kenyan athletes who cannot afford to come to America for college. I also participate in triathlons and aspire to complete and Ironman in the summer of 2012. Here is a photo of me finishing my second sprint triathlon.

NASPE Standard 5
Standard 5: Exhibits responsible personal and social behavior that respects self and others in physical activity settings.
Impact on Student Learning - Physical Education teacher candidates utilize assessments and reflection to foster student learning and inform instructional decisions.

NASPE Standard 6
Standard 6: Values physical activity for health, enjoyment, challenge, self-expression, and/or social interaction.
Professionalism - Physical Education teacher candidates demonstrate dispositions essential to becoming effective professionals.
To enhance my professionalism in all aspects this semester I started working on my coaching skills with students that I do not know so it was more of a challenge. Previously I would go help out at my local High School and coach the distance team, many of the guys on the team now were either on the middle school teams or team mates of mine during my senior year so it is not that difficult to communicate with them. But as shown HERE I spent the fall semester coaching at homer high school. Cross Country was tough because I came in mid season and the coach was in the swing of it already. But before winter track started I met with the coach and discussed plans for the season and it is really working well with the athletes. So far the 3 girls that I work with have all had major Personal Best early on in the season so the future looks bright for the team at Homer. I will continue with this in the spring and next fall to try and really develop a relationship with the student-athletes and help them achieve not only their athletic goals but mainly their academic goals.
I also attended the NYS AHPERD Conference this past November which was absolutely amazing. I am always mesmerized when I leave those conferences due to the fact that I just never stop learning for the whole time I am there. It never stops. In this picture the presenter was an elementary school teacher and I did not realize until I tried that I was a little to big for to go under. Luckily the equipment was easy to put back together.
One other event that I took part in was the SUNY Cortland mini conference. I was a presider for the speed Speed Stackers.

IMMUNE STRENGTH

After playing the game immune attack, there was one thing that really jumped out to me about it. There is just way to much information being given to the player. When they were explaining the buttons I was having so much trouble remembering all of them. I also feel that the descriptions of the diseases were way to descriptive. A lot of the information seemed like it belonged in a high level high school class or even a beginner anatomy class. Another thought about the game is that it would require the teacher to have an advanced knowledge of biology. This is necessary because if a student has a question the teacher needs to be able to answer it and make sure the student understands. This game would probably fit best in a Biology teacher's lesson.
This was the ship that flew through the blood vessels. I had to drive it around trying to kill the diseases. That was pretty cool because learning to drive it was pretty tricky but once I somewhat understood how to guide the ship it was interesting.
This is a map of the blood vessels. When the commander would give me a mission the disease would pop up on the map and I would have to guide my ship through the vessels using the map for directions.

The lesson I thought would be good for a unit like this is body composition and exercising because to keep our immune system strong we have to stay healthy and fit. Teaching kids what the body is made of and how hard we have to work to lose weight.
Lesson Plan
10 Task Sheet
Activity Sheet
There is no answer sheet required for this activity as the students are graded on levels of creativity. As stated on the sheet I want my students to get a visual grasp of what the body looks like in terms of these 3 components.

A Little taste of a great Semester

The video says it all, all I can say is there is something happening here and it was a great semester thanks to the A-Listers aka the whole 255 class and especially Lab Assistants.

The First of 40

I have been coaching at Homer High School since the end of September. I started in the middle of cross country and am currently in full effect with winter track as we had our first meet last Saturday. I am loving coaching and plan on doing it for the next 40+ years. It allows me to impact students on a much more personal basis. It also is not as challenging because most of us all have the same goals. The reason why I say most is because some of the kids I coach really do not like to give their very best each and every day. That is my project for next semester. To have 100% commitment by each athlete on that team. I feel I have already started connecting to those kids because at the meet I was writing down their splits and when they were done breaking down the whole race and showing them where they can improve. The reason for this is now I am giving them something to think about to improve on in practice and races which in reality is increasing their effort without them even knowing. The thing I like best about this job is that I am training with the students and suffering through the workouts each day just like they do. Last Wednesday I assigned them 8x400 with 2 minutes rest and I really wanted them to hammer it. The Monday before I was explaining to them how they need to not only mentally but physically prepare for the workout and not bring excuses. They did exactly what I asked and brought a huge smile to my face after the workout. Everyone hit the exact splits that I asked and most importantly everyone was absolutely spent after. I really felt like for the first time in my short coaching tenure I did exactly what was planned to make these athletes better, not to mention I got a good workout in as well averaging 67.5 with the top guy. In high school it was always days like that, that would bring my teammates and I so much closer because we all wanted to accomplish the same thing and we all achieved it together.
To verify my winter track hours I had the head coach write a short letter to show that I have been helping out with the team.
I am looking forward to what the next 40 years have in store for me in the coaching world.

Vancouver or Bust

On Wednesday my final teaching experience went better than great. The reason I feel this was is because I had so much fun doing it. Skating around with music playing and the rest of my classmates was really fun. Although in my time coding sheet I did not receive the best score I was very close to all the required percentages so I was not that upset. The thing that really took a lot of time was class management. The reason for this is because there were some students who skated faster than others and also while I was giving instructions a few times students fell which caused a lot of attention and I also had to make sure the students were alright after they fell. It was very interesting looking at the sheet seeing how many different things I was doing in the lesson.
My favorite part of my lesson was the hook that I used. I am an avid fan of the Olympics and the minute I found out I had skating I had to put and Olympic twist on it, especially with one coming up this February. Also it was fun using professor Xavier Waddles Phd. to help me to teach. Jack helped me think of that scaffolding idea and it worked out perfectly. He will probably be used again sometime in the future.
My C9 score really gave me a boost. I really try not to base my lesson on the sheet because I just want to make the lesson flow and not really stress over hitting certain points. I did miss check for understanding but I did get one bonus point so I got a 20/20
I was very happy with how I gave my feedback. According to my feedback analysis sheet I said something at least once to everyone in the class. I had a feeling that I would be able to give a lot of feedback going into the lesson due to the setup of the students. I had them skating widths of the ice and I would just go down the line and talk to each student. Also I really try to work on staying away from words like "good". In my previous lessons I had used that excessively so I really focused on giving specific feedback. Although I did notice that I gave more specific feedback to the people who looked like they were having trouble, for example Jed who was excellent on the Ice got 3 congruent tallies and 1 specific tally. Martino, who was having a little more trouble, received 3 specific tallies and 1 congruent tally.
In terms of paper work I really tried to make my lesson plan better for Lab D. I had a pretty good feel of what I needed to do to improve so I think it went better this time around. I did make a cue change in the middle of the lesson. I added the arm cue in the middle because I noticed the students looked good with the true skating technique and I feel I needed to add another cue or it would have been to repetitive.
One thing that was wrong but not necessarily a big deal in my lesson was the last two activities. In terms of progressions I really should have put the free skate around the ice last and the train activity before it. The reason why I did this is because I wanted to end on what I felt was most fun for the activity and the train activity was definitely more fun for the students. Another problem that I really need to improve is the use of the word "guys". I say it way to much and I need to focus on saying class. I did happen to catch myself once but it is still a problem that needs to be worked on.

NYS AAHPERD

All I can say is wow. This is my second conference of career and all I can say is it just gets better and better. We arrived Thursday and were non-stop until Saturday morning.
Thursday we ventured into Dr. Walkuski's presentation and were really impressed about what he had to say. He really inspired me to take action on my professional development. He gave us a packet with ways to improve our marketability and networking status. The best part was that he gave us deadlines for each, so now we cannot just push away the paper. We have to reach our goals by our deadlines. What was very interesting was at the end of the session there was an administrator from Lockport who basically verified everything that was said in the presentation. He also talked about how intense the job market is. He said they have hired 4 teachers in 5 years and the last one they hired the school did not even advertise they had an opening and they received 125 applications which they then selected 20 for interviews and called back 6. That was scary to hear. It basically told me my resume has to be filled with such unreal achievements and then if I happen to be called for an interview I have 10 minutes to tell him why I am the best. It really opened my eyes.
Friday morning started with a bang as we went to the keynote speaker which was unreal. He was very personable as he spoke about spirit, mind, body and emotion. I really cannot describe it but I will give some quotes the man gave us. "To know and not to do is not to know", "You can have people healed but not cured, cured but not healed." and my personal favorite was "Humans are like tea bags, you do not know their strength until they are put into hot water." That one really moved me, it made me think about so many people that did so many great things when under pressure. For example, surviving cancer. That is the hottest water you can find and people who survive that have unreal strength. The next presentation did not go as well; Dr. Bailey's presentation was canceled due to illness (good thing shell be teaching me next semester so I wont be missing out to much). We instead went to watch Ryan Ingalls officially become President of the Future Professionals section of AAHPERD. They also had a free lunch which was a pretty good perk as well as a good raffle where I won a whistle. SUNY Cortland won majority of the prizes so we rubbed it in Brockport's face which was funny. We had a war of words all week. After that we went to a presentation by the NYS elementary teacher of the year. She was very good and we got a nice sized packet of awesome games to play which were very educational and had a lot of inter-task variation. She also told us how she incorporates her lesson's with the teacher's to include more educational task. The last presentation I went to was very interesting in terms of liability. A group of teachers from Rochester did a presentation on low budget games. The thing that was interesting about it is about 75% of the games they used involved a pegging or (dodge ball) style. They did stress safety saying you can only throw it underhand and only hit below the knees and if you hit above the knees you were automatically out. I asked one of them after about it and they felt that if they stress the safety they should be alright but I was still iffy about it and would hesitate if my administrators watched my class often. That night we went to the Jay B. Nash dinner and got a real good meal while watching some unbelievable people get teacher of the year awards. It was really cool to see this as this is what we are all striving to be.

Saturday morning I presided for a group from Syracuse who did a presentation call Food, Fun, Fitness. It was very good as they incorporated lifetime fitness and food into their games. Also on a side note they were advised by Dr. Sandy Bargainnier a former professor of our very own Professor Yang. Overall This was a phenomenal experience and I advise every P.E. major take advantage of such a great opportunity when they can.

My First State Qualifier

Yesterday at the Section 3 Cross-Country Champs we were very on edge going into the girls race. We knew that our top girl had a real shot to qualify for the state meet next weekend. She put tucked herself rite behind the leaders from the gun and made it her duty to stay with them. When she passed me at the 2k mark she looked pretty strong holding the last individual qualifying spot. I then sprinted across the field to catch her at the halfway mark of 2500m and gave her a few words of wisdom mainly saying "This is where the heart comes into play." I watched her go to the back loop and into the woods holding position, though it looked like people were closing on her. When she came back out peaking the muddy hill she still had the last spot in her grasp but there was one person closing on her and was within about 10m with about 600 to go. I got as close to her as I could and screamed at her that she has the spot and has to finish it now. She looked rite at me put her head down and went. Waiting for her to come down the final stretch was very nerve racking. Finally she came into the stretch with the same lead and I just got scared because there is nothing worse than getting out-kicked in the final 100m, especially when a spot to the state meet is on line. Finally with about 50m left she kicked it into overdrive and crossed the line for a 6th place finish and 5th after displacement of the team that won. Most importantly a free T-Shirt and a trip to Plattsburgh for the NYSPHSAA Cross-Country Champs. When I first saw her after the race she just said thank you to me and said that if I did not scream with 600 to go she may not have got it. That made me feel great about myself and made me realize that I really did have an effect on this athletes success. It makes me excited about the future and the next 40 years of coaching. I hope that this is the first of many state qualifiers and will hopefully lead to a Team Qualification and maybe even some hardware at the state meet.