Elliot's Perspective:Oh my goodness, we made it! It feels like Caroline and I started our project yesterday; I can’t believe it’s been 12 weeks. I think we have done a very good job of managing our time, and that allowed us to complete our project on time. We worked a lot on our presentation this week, and we’re almost done, so we’re going to meet over Christmas break to finalize it and rehearse. I’m really looking forward to finishing it and I think it’s going to look great! I’ll probably end up going over to Caroline’s house twice over the break just so we can be super confident about presenting before actually having to present in front of the whole class when we go back to school. Overall, I think I’ve learned a lot throughout this 12-week period, and I’m really proud of Caroline and Myself for accomplishing our goal, and coming up with an end product we are proud of! Caroline's Perspective:Holy cow!! I genuinely cannot believe that it is already week 12. Elliot & I were able to work on our presentation quite a bit this week with the presentation and the final video. I got my wisdom teeth out on Thursday, so I did miss a day of class but Elliot kept working on the project & the presentation because she is an awesome partner! On Friday, we worked more on the presentation during the little “Christmas party” that we had during class. Elliot & I plan on meeting up, probably twice, over Christmas break to work on the finishing touches to the presentation & also so that we can rehearse it & practice it so that we are super confident when we present! I am quite happy with Elliot & I’s project and progression over the past 12 weeks & I am excited to see how it all turns out!
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Elliot's perspectiveThis was another very successful week. Caroline and I really started working on our final presentation and figuring out the logistics of it. I started putting together a video on iMovie of all the clips of us playing, and it looks pretty good. We still have to make some small adjustments and edits, but I’m glad I was able to complete most of it in class this week. While I was doing this, Caroline was working on formatting the slides so that they would look nice, clean, and pretty. We are going to work on it more this upcoming week, and we are going to meet up at her house over Christmas break to add any finishing touches, and practice presenting. I’m very excited about how our presentation is looking so far, and I can't wait to work on it more next week! Caroline's Perspective:As Elliot said, this week was a pretty productive one and we were able to get a fair amount done! We worked on our presentation a lot once we had figured out what exactly we wanted to do with it, how we wanted it to look, and how we wanted to format everything. Elliot started creating the video that shows my progression over the past 12 weeks & she was able to get a good bit of that done as well. We will need to adjust a few things with it but that will be easier to do once the ‘structure’ of the video is complete. Hopefully we will be able to get most of the rest of the presentation done this coming week. We will probably meet up at some point over Christmas break and continue to work on it and add our final touches so that it is ready to present when we get back from break. So far the presentation is looking pretty good so hopefully it will look how we want it in the end. I am super happy with how it looks so far & I am excited to see it all come together!
Elliot's perspective:It’s crazy how close we are to being done with genius hour; it feels like we just started. This week, Caroline and I started working on our final presentation, since we accomplished our goal last week. We looked at past presentations, and watched videos of students talking about genius hour. I found a template on slidesgo.com, and Caroline and I both really liked it, so I downloaded it. We are starting to plan out the layout we want to use, and figure out the flow of our presentation. I’m very excited with how our progress has progressed, and I’m hopeful that our final presentation will end up turning out great! Caroline's perspective It’s wild to think that we are already at week 10; only 2 more weeks left! As planned (finally), we started to work on our presentation this week. We had kind of talked about what our plan for the presentation was before but this week we decided on it more officially and got started! As Elliot mentioned, we watched a few videos and past presentations to get some ideas. Then, Elliot found us a really cool template and downloaded it since we both liked it and decided we wanted to use it. Now we are in the process of designing the layout and flow of the presentation and once we have that figured out, we’re going to start working on creating the actual presentation and adding all the pictures, videos, and descriptions that we have! I am super excited to work on the presentation in the next few weeks and see how it all ends up coming together. Hopefully it will end up being what we have imagined it as!
Elliot's Perspective:I think this week was my favorite week of Genius Hour yet. We actually played our official match this week, which is really exciting because it means we accomplished our goal! We played a match following the same rules that we use in highschool tennis. The match was best of 3 sets to 6, and if we made it to a 3rd set, a 10 point tie-breaker would be played. I beat her 6-0, 6-0, but the score doesn’t totally represent how the match went; we had some really great points and long rallies. Caroline knew all the rules, she kept score correctly, and had fair calls, so that led to us having a successful match. She even rated the morning an 8.5/10, which was just a cherry on top of the whole experience. It was an amazing experience to watch her learn and grow over the past 9 weeks, and it has also been very rewarding to see how she applied what I taught her to her game. For the next 3 weeks we’ll focus on getting a slideshow together with all the photos and videos we have, and we’ll tie up any loose-ends we have left on our project. Caroline's PerspectiveToday we made it to our goal and played the final match of the project! I would say that the match went pretty well. We warmed up and then Elliot did a final run through of the rules with me just to make sure that we were both on the same page and to clear up any questions I had before we started. We used the same rules as high school tennis which is best out of 3 & each set is to 6. Elliot beat me 0-6, 0-6 but I still had fun and I would say that we accomplished our goal. There were a lot of good points and points that had quite a few shots back and forth, I didn’t get too confused with the score and was able to keep track of it pretty well, and Elliot was super helpful with telling me what I did that caused certain shots to go out and what I needed to do to fix it. She definitely improved with her teaching skills over the course of the project which was fun to watch! Now, for the rest of the project we will work on our slideshow and putting together our final project with all the vidoes and pictures we have.
Elliot's Perspective:This week actually went to plan, and I’m so glad we were able to play again. Caroline did great today, and we focused on playing out full games, as opposed to rallying, so she could get the hang of scoring and seeing how an actual match works. I explained a few things about calling the lines, scoring, and serving/receiving, and then we got started with playing. We did this all in preparation for next week, which will basically be the climax of our whole project. We are planning to have our official match next week, which would mean we would accomplish our project goal! We want to play next week in order to allow us time to put together a slideshow of how our project progressed for when we have our class presentation. We also just wanted to do it on week 9 to allow ourselves some wiggle room in case something happens (like last week). We have pictures and videos that we’ve taken over the weeks, and I think we can make a very informal slideshow of not only Caroline’s progress, but also of how I’ve progressed while teaching her. I’m really looking forward to next week! Caroline’s Perspective: This week we played on Saturday and instead of working on Elliot feeding me the tennis balls and me practicing my forehands and backhands, we tried to play more of a mini match. We started by running a little and stretching and then I hit a few practice forehands and backhands before we started actually playing. Elliot explained a few things to me and she was also super helpful when she was telling me stuff to improve my playing throughout the game. Next week will will get to the point this whole project has been leading up to and we will play the official match, which is exciting! After next week, we will spend the rest of the twelve weeks working on our presentation and on the video of both of our progress. I am super excited to put all the videos, pictures, and blogs together in the slideshow. I love working on things like that and I think it will be interesting to look back on how much we have both improved! Elliot's PerspectiveThis week Caroline and I just took a break from playing, and unlike last week, I didn't really teach her any rules or anything like that. We knew that this week wouldn't be as productive as some of our past weeks because Caroline was out of town this weekend. She was actually in Kentucky for Nationals for riding, which is awesome! She told me about this a few weeks ago, so we had planned to either do something before she left, or over the weekend virtually, but I messed that up. I was going to explain more rules to her on Wednesday when we were working on Genius Hour, bu I just did not feel good at all. Well, it turns out I have the flu, so that really messed up any plans we had. I basically have just laid in my bed all weekend, so us getting anything done was a bust. We do have a plan for the next coming weeks. We'll play next week, and then we'll do our official match on week 9. Originally, our match was supposed to be played on week 8, but due to setbacks, we'll play it during week 9. After that, we'll work on getting our presentation ready, and making sure everything from our project is completed.
Elliot's PerspectiveThis week was honestly probably our most unproductive week. We tried to be proactive and plan when we were going to play, but our schedules were conflicting, and also mother nature was not on our side. We planned to play on Sunday because that was the day that worked for both of us, but it was raining on and off all day, and tennis courts have to be completely dry to play on, so it did not work out. To problem solve, I texted Caroline and asked her what she wanted to do. I said she could come to my house and we could do some workouts, or we could do something else if she had any ideas. She asked if we could go over the rules of how to play and keep score, and I thought that was a great idea. Since she was busy most of the day, I went onto YouTube and found her a good video to watch explaining the rules of the game so whenever she had a free moment in her day, she could watch it. It never really dawned on me how complicated keeping score in tennis can be just because of the fact that I’ve been playing and keeping score my whole life, so that was a teaching hurdle I had to overcome. Even though this week didn't go to plan, I’m glad we were able to problem solve, and at least get something done. Caroline's PerspectiveAs Elliot said, this week was probably our least productive week so far and we were presented with a few challenges. A few of those challenges were conflicting schedules and the weather. We were both super busy this weekend and I, especially, did not have my life together which forced us to have to work around my lack of organization. Elliot was kind enough to be willing to just send me a video to watch to help explain the rules of the game. I have learned the rules before but at this point I had forgotten most of them so a refresher was good to help me relearn them! I was able to remember most of the rules, like how to score a game, when the ball is in or out, and how different circumstances change thing. One example of a specific rule that is circumstantial is normally if you hit the ball and it skims the net before going over, it still counts and you keep playing the point. The exception to this rule is when you're serving. When you are serving and the ball skims the net before going over, it is called a "let" and you get to redo that serve.
Elliot’s Perspective: Today Caroline and I played tennis again. (this is the 3rd time, and the 3rd weekend in a row we’ve played) I’m really enjoying it, and I’m glad we decided to do this for our project! I’ve learned a lot about teaching and articulating what I want to say in a way that Caroline and others can understand, and Caroline has improved her game so much already. Today we had a slight obstacle because Caroline was injured. She was riding, and she fell off her horse and the horse stepped on her leg. She had a huge bruise, and it hurt her to run and it hurt when she had impact on her leg, so we had to adjust. We did less of a warmup without jogging and focused more on stretching. Then we did more forehands and backhands, and today I even introduced her to overheads. Today we focused on trying to add more topspin and pace to her shots, which comes from form and technique. Caroline did really well with this on her forehands and backhands, so I showed her what an overhead was and taught her how to hit one. She did great! After that, she worked on serving for a little, and then we rallied. We didn’t do too much because it hurt her to run, so we kept the running minimal. Overall, I’m really happy with how she played today, and I was proud of myself for teaching her effectively. It’s awesome to see her game progressing, and I’m looking forward to our next playing session. Elliot’s Perspective:We played tennis again this weekend! We actually had less conflict with schedules this week, so Caroline was able to come to my house and we played up at the Bermuda Run tennis courts. I think it went really well! I told her we were going to crack down and work on technique and execution of different shots. First, just like last week, we stretched and did muscle activation exercises. Then, I showed Caroline how to do shadow swings. Shadow swings are when you swing your racket like you would when you’re playing, but there’s no tennis ball you have to hit. This allows you to focus on the actual swing, instead of the results of a swing when you hit a tennis ball. After this, we started hitting. I fed Caroline some forehands and backhands, and there was a noticeable improvement from last week. I showed her how to get topspin on your shots, and we broke down her swing step by step. After this, we served and she did really well with that too. We rallied and that also went significantly better than last week. Caroline was able to keep a rally for 6-8 shots, when last week she could barely hit it back to me once when we were rallying. This was really the first week I was teaching her because last week I wanted to see what she could do just on her own without me saying anything. This time I went through what we were doing and I explained why we were doing it. I think I explained things well because she would always apply whatever I was telling her to do to her swing. Overall, I think our session went awesome, and I’m really looking forward to the next time we play! Caroline’s Perspective:This week is week 4 of genius hour and our second time playing tennis. We had easier schedules to work with this week so we were able to go play tennis at the Bermuda Run courts on Saturday night. This week seemed to go a good bit better than last week. Last week I didn’t really know what to do and I was pretty bad. This week, though, I was more confident and Elliot was teaching me better than last week. We started off with jogging around the court and then Elliot showed me some more exercises to warm up and stretch a little bit. After that, we worked on forehands and Elliot showed me the motions of a correct forehand. Then, she fed me the tennis balls, I would hit them, and Elliot would tell me what I needed to work on and what I could to to improve. After we worked on forehands, we moved on to backhands and did the same thing with those. Backhands seem to be harder for me, but they were still better than they were the last time we played. Once we finished up with backhands, we served a little bit. Serving is my personal favorite because I think it is good for anger management. Elliot gave me some tips on how to hit a better serve and we did a few more that were better than the first ones. We wrapped up with some rallying and we were able to rally for longer than we could last time, which was good. I think it went better than last time and Elliot is learning how to be a better teacher already!
We played for the first official time today, and it went really well! We both took the PSAT, so we went down to the High School courts afterward, and had our first official session. Today was just laying the groundwork for the rest of the project. We started off with stretching and a few footwork drills to get our legs going. Then, I told Caroline it was time to start hitting. I hand fed (threw the ball to her as opposed to hitting it) her some forehands and backhands. After that, I had Caroline come forward to the net to hit some volleys. She almost hit me, but it was okay because it was really funny. After that, we picked up the balls and went into serving. We went through the serving motion together, and did some shadow swinging (swinging without hitting the ball), then it was time for her to try it with the ball. She did really well, and actually made a few on her first couple of tries. Finally, we attempted to rally a little bit and Caroline even tried serving to me and we played out those points. Overall, I'd say it was a very successful day and I think there will be a lot of learning and improvements made throughout this 12 week period.
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