Author: Joseph Alt

Today I’ll finish up instructing basketball here at TFS. I have the usual classes throughout the day, and then at 4:00 PM I’ll begin a basketball training session–run by Coach Frye, Coach Chelsea, and me–for 7th-12th graders.

This week has definitely given me a ton of experience and been super fun, but balancing the schedule with other work I’m doing (project related and non-project related) has been super tiring and challenging. I definitely have a firsthand respect for gym teachers and coaches like Sharma, Frye, Lucas, Elder etc–especially those juggling numerous responsibilities or jobs. It takes a lot of effort to keep calm, match, increase or decrease the energy level of your students, and gauge how your going to use your authority to balance safety, control, and intensity with goofiness and fun. That being said it’s definitely a rewarding, worthwhile pursuit and I think the importance of good coaches (who teach teamwork and philosophy as well as athletics), positive competition (teaching kids to channel energy and aggression into positive pursuits rather then encouraging them to suppress their own identities) is way undervalued in America and often tackled in the wrong ways–the TFS model for athletics has room for improvement but is optimal compared to others.

I’ve just finished a second day of teaching gym classes. I arrive at school at around 8:30-9:00 to set up anything I’ll be using during the lessons, which are centered around basketball. In the AM I had two 1st-3rd grade classes today, and then the preschool class (all in one consecutive run). I had a dribbling obstacle course for these classes, we worked on passing with monkey in the middle, and then I let them play basketball against each other for about ten minutes. The preschoolers are one of my most difficult classes because they’re attention spans are extremely short, there are a lot of them, and they aren’t aware of their ability to knock each other down or drop a basketball on each others skulls. At one point yesterday I found myself intervening as a preschooler sat on his friend’s face.

I’ve finished another chapter, did a workout with a bball training client, and am going to be starting a week of teaching gym classes for preschool through 8th grade this Monday. Looking forward to having a bit more scheduled time with set activities and free periods where I can write.

Current schedule: doing around six to eight hours of renovation work for grandparents in the day, not part of project plan. To work around this I’ve been testing varying interval workouts for a personal training client once I get home (around 7:00 or 8:00 PM) and have been planning the basketball lessons for lower school next week and working on novel in the night.

Current progress: nearly done with a fresh chapter for novel, currently at an eighty-three page total. Have sent plans to Coach Sharma for doing a gym unit on basketball for lower school next week. Have made and sent several workouts to client, will be playing basketball with him this weekend to assess current skill level.

Thus far I’ve been writing for my novel and preparing workouts to improve a client’s upper body strength for upcoming soccer and basketball seasons. Getting a daily routine or schedule together has been the biggest challenge thus far as much of my project is open ended right now.

I will be:

1. Writing a novel titled “An Occult View of the Current Conflict in Vietnam”.
2. Planning several sports camps, one to be conducted with Coach Frye, the other two in the Summer (one soccer, one basketball).
3. Conducting personal training sessions for student athletes, specifically to increase basketball-skill(z).
4. Teaching a week long athletics unit to the Fulton students about basketball and how it can help you stop being a lil snot.