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.
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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.
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