Motivational Speaker- Mr. John F. Edwards

Mr. Edwards is a motivational speaker that has received many awards. Recently he came to my college to give a speech on how to be successful in life, but mostly in your profession. Going to his speech taught me a lot about how to be successful for when I get a job in my profession later. He stated that success was 85 percent attitude and 15 percent altitude, and that having a good attitude will increase your altitude. By saying this he means having a good attitude it is inevitable that success will happen.
The main thing that he stressed that is vital to having success at the workplace is communication. He stated that "the art of communication had become a dying art in corporate America." When he said this I think that he was trying to say that people are starting to become incapable of working together or relating to other's. This is causing a decline in the success that a business has.
He also said "communication is nothing more and nothing less than relationship development." Could this be linked with the rise in technology that has been happening? I think so. If you look at the way that children are growing up today, and how much technology they use, it is obvious that they are not communicating with each other as much as previous generations have. Today there are more games than I can remember and also more texting and computer use than there has ever been in the past. I do not see that technology use is going to decline, it will instead most likely increase, and because of that the people that interact with kids need to involve them in activities outside of that. There is no reason that kids can't play outside or in the house without technology and instead use their imaginations to make up games. By having kids do this I think that it will increase their ability to communicate well with other's and inevitably make them more successful when they become adults.
Mr. Edwards also talked about culturalization in society. Smaller groups are now being created in societies instead of having one large group. A prime example of this is the neighborhood that you live in. A few generations ago everyone knew their neighbors and would sit on their front porches to socialize, now very few people know their neighbors and even if they do it is highly likely that they do not socialize with one another. Instead people sit inside or on their back porch and only talk with the people within their household or people that visit them. By this happening people are not as friendly and are not able to communicate as well with people that they don't know. This is not good because now many people try to do work by themselves instead of working with other people. This is bad because two minds, or more, work better than one. It is often that when a group of people work together they are able to come up with more ideas than if they were working alone.
From what he said at the conference I realized that I am a person that is rather good at communicating with others. I take what someone says into account and do not discourage their ideas if I do not like them. If I happen to find something wrong with what they say I just try to expand on what they were thinking. A large part of this could have been from when I was a child because I didn't stay inside to play video games very often. Instead I was outside playing with all of the kids in my neighborhood. We made up games, rode our bikes, roller bladed, or played various sports. I hope that all of what he said ring's true and that when I start my job I am able to communicate well with the people that I work with to create a positive working environment and also one that I can excel in.

Locomotor Lab Part B

There was a wide variability of the movement patterns that I observed, but what it really comes down to is whether or not the students were able to perform the locomotor movement. The students that I observed are all able to perform the movements, but some are better able to perform the movement better than others. There were two students that I assessed, but once again one was a girl and one was a boy, both of which were in kindergarden and at the age of five. With these two children I saw that both of their skill abilities were about even. They are both at the mature level for the leap. With the horizontal jump they are both at the initial level. The last movement that I assessed them on was the slide. With this they were both also at the initial level.

There were many teaching strategies that I used while I was working with the children. I was enthusiastic, human, courteous, properly dressed, and I got down to their level whenever I was working one on one with a student. I think that by doing all of these I made it so that the children were more comfortable with me and were better able to relate to me. In my opinion the strategies that was more effective than others was getting down to their level and being enthusiastic. By doing these the kids were more passionate about what we were trying to have them do and they also felt more comfortable talking with me.

Locomotor Lab Part A

There is a very wide variety of the abilities that the students at St. Mary’s have with their locomotor movements. All of the students are able to run with pretty mature ability, but their abilities to gallop and hop were not very good. I think that their ability to perform these tasks weren’t as great because they do not have to do them as often as they run. It is obvious that doing something repetitively makes it easier to do. The same goes for learning different subject materials in school, and also all the different sports that there are.

My class observed two children while we were at St. Mary’s. They are both six and in kindergarden. The only difference between them is that one is a male and the other is a female. With their running abilities I saw that both of them seemed to be mature. The other two abilities that I was observing them on, the gallop and the hop, were not as good. I realized that they were not the only students struggling with this though, the rest of the students at the school were having trouble as well. The boy was definitely a little bit more developed in the gallop than the girl was was, but I think that from what I saw they are still in the initial stage. The boy also seemed to have more ability to perform the last locomotor movement that we had them perform, the hop.

Many of the people in my class first explained the activity that everyone was going to do and then from there they let the students perform the task. I did not see that they were correcting the students if they were not doing any of the tasks wrong, but instead let the students perform it as they thought that they should. I think that this was very good for the kids because they are able to develop the tasks at their own rate, and can observe the kids around them to see if they are doing the activity correctly. This also helped us because we were better able to observe the two kids to evaluate where they stood with their ability without someone helping them to improve first.

Another thing that everyone in the class did really well was being happy and cheerful. With this I noticed that all the kids were happier to be there and really wanted to participate in the games. I noticed that some of the students were better able to perform the tasks that they were assigned, such as hopping and galloping, because they were more excited about participating.

I think that one of the main things that was more effective with teaching was when there were materials used for the games. One of the groups had the kids bring balls back to their hula hoops and another had the kids running around trying to capture the other kids “flags.” I noticed that by using these things the kids were more excited and became more active in the game.

A large part of interacting with these kids is being excited to be there. Our class is at the end of the school day, so it is sometimes very hard to muster up the energy to be cheerful and bubbly around the kids. In spite of this, it is definitely something that has to be done in order to keep their attention and I think that we do a really good job of having a high level of energy for the children.