Tennis Coaching for Kids

Our project to improve our resume was to help coach kids in a free tennis clinic once a week after school. We decided to get together and work with our coach who coordinated the clinic every week so that we can help and improve the system so that the kids have a better environment to learn.

What We Did

Our coach holds the free clinic at our school every friday after school from 4 to 5 p.m. It is difficult for him to be in charge of all the kids and help them all at the same time, so he needs help from other coaches. We decided that we can help him out and be in charge of some of the kids.

During the clinic, we lead the kids different drills that will help them learn how to play tennis and get bette r at it. We are able to interact with the kids and feed them the tennis balls so it makes it easy for them to hit and start learning how to play without any past knowledge or skills.

Our Experience

This project helped us overall because we were able to interact and deal with kids. We learned how to teach them properly and how they usually act. It was a great experience and it felt like we were being useful and the kids were getting something out of our work. All kids from the community were allowed to come, meaning we get to meet them and also some of their parents, because in the end, they will be in our position and possibly be on the team after we were.

Taking Risks

Check out this post I read from shawntt’s blog. The topic of the blog post is how people should take risks in their life, and not just live a simple and easy lifestyle. I found it very interesting since there were different examples used that showed how taking risks is important to get things done in life, and nothing will ever happen if you do not take any risks. Everything that changes in the world is because someone takes risks and they are able to do something new and they benefit from their experience.

Society and Technology

T.S Eliot once said “ Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” In life, sometimes you have to take risk in order to succeed in what you are doing. An example of this would be trying to own a business. Not all businesses are successful. In fact, there are a lot of businesses that end up going bankrupt or people actually start to lose money from the business. But some can be very awarding, take Mcdonalds for example, one day someone came up with an idea to make a fast food restaurant that would be significantly different from all the other fast foods to attract more people.I’ve recently scrolled upon a commercial announcement that Microsoft will be making a hologram lens that will let you do many extraordinary things like build blueprints for projects and even entertainment. A lot of…

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Overprotective Parents

Almost everyone has lived or lives with their parents, or someone else who takes care of them and has control over them. All children end up reaching an age where they do not want to do everything their parents say and the parents or guardians prevent their kids from doing a lot of things they want to do. I think this mostly occurs during the teenage years, especially between ages 16-17 because that is when the kids think they have matured and want more freedom.

When teenagers reach a certain age or a certain level of maturity, they no longer need their parents to be taking care of them the whole time and being super protective over them. An example of this can be seen in my life since a lot of the times when I want to go out or do things on my own, my parents stop me from doing so and do not allow me to go places or hang out with friends sometimes. Often times, they say that I need to be studying and trying hard in school, but one person can only do that so much. Sometimes my parents also worry for me when I am not with them since they might think I could be in danger or be hurt in some way.

Although I do not always want to do what my parents want me to do, I have to end up listening to them anyways since there is nothing else I can do and they still have control over me. Relating to a larger problem in the world, there is always someone higher than you and has at least some control over you. Employees all have their bosses over them, the president of the United States can be stopped by Congress and the Supreme Court, and powerful countries as a whole such as the United States can be controlled by other countries working together. In the end, no one will ever have the complete power to do anything they want.

Harsh Lives of Migrant Farmers

Migrant farmers are a group of people in California who had lost their farms in places like Oklahoma due to the dust bowl, and were forced to move away. They now migrate from farm to farm and work very hard for many farms, and do not get much out of it.

These are a few pictures of how they have to work and their bad working conditions. These pictures were taken from THIS ARTICLE describing the lives of migrant farmers, and this word should be spread. These farmers are unnoticed people that are in need of help.

The Power of Languages

Everyone will sometime in their life encounter someone that does not speak the same language as them. Obviously, without being able to speak the same language, it is very hard to communicate and interact with each other. There are so many different languages out there in the world, and it is practically impossible to learn every single one so that you can communicate with anyone that you meet from many different cultures and races. A seemingly easy solution to this is that everyone learns and is taught the same language in schools making everyone able to talk to each other and getting rid of the any language barriers. This seems possible, but many people would not want to do this since their language is a huge part of a culture and tradition, and no one wants to have their culture start to fade away and soon become nonexistent. Often people that immigrate to a new country where a different language is spoken and end up having to learn the language. This leads to the next, or later generations in the new country to slowly stop using the actual language of their race and become assimilated so much that they use the new language a lot more.

Personally, I was born and raised in the United States, but my first language was not English. My parents and family always spoke Urdu in the house, leading me to have learned Urdu as my first language. Although all of my siblings and I started off speaking Urdu, now none of us speak Urdu, even to our parents. Once my two older siblings started learning English in school, they started speaking it in the house and I started to pick up and learn from them. Sooner or later, we had replaced Urdu and only communicate in English. Even our parents had learned English and now my siblings and I speak to my parents in English and my parents speak to us in Urdu, but are starting to use more and more English as they speak. This shows how a language that is mainly spoken in area causes other languages, and everyone ends up speaking the same language. It makes it easier to communicate, but at the same time causes some cultures to fade away and they could slowly lose their languages.

Humans’ Affect on the World

Mathematics

Math; a major part of school that the majority of people really despise. Everyone says how complicated it is with all these different numbers, variables, and formulas. Obviously it is not one of the easier subjects in school where most people have an easy time. It requires a lot of logic and reasoning to understand different concepts. I think that there are two main reasons why people really dislike math, one is that it is complicated with different formulas and such, and another is that it requires a lot of thinking and logic to understand, which a lot of people do not have the patience to do.

I think I am part of the minority that does not hate math, but actually enjoys and appreciates it. Just because I like math, it does not mean that I think its really easy for me, because sometimes its the complete opposite of easy. As I said before, it requires reasoning and logic to get through some problems which I think is something I enjoy. I feel that you have to be able to look at things from more than one perspective sometimes to see the solution, which is important. Everyone always asks why math is ever going to be important and the usual response is that you may be using it sometime in your life, but it is usually a very specific example such as measuring the area of a garden. I think other than these specific situations, just using and working with math can help with solving any problems in general in life, even if they are not math related. Math can teach you to think outside the box which can be useful throughout your entire life.

TRUE FRIEND, OR ACQUAINTANCE?

Everyone has a group of people that they usually hang out with. The most common people you talk to are probably the closest people to you probably other than your family, and in some cases, friends can be closer than family. One person by them self can know and have talked to many people but how many of them are actually friends? Or are they acquaintances? There definition of an acquaintance differs from the definition of a friend. Of course everyone always says that a true friend is someone that you can always talk to, it is someone that you can tell anything to including secrets and trust them with it, and it is someone that is always there for you. This is all true and is said often, but do people actually mean it and live by it? In today’s society, especially in the teenager and young adult life, everyone cares about popularity and having a good reputation which means that they are liked by many people and have a lot of “friends.” One of the main ways that people try to become popular is through social media and have a lot of friends, but those friends usually are not friends.

Knowing the difference between true friends and acquaintances can be very important, as I witnessed a situation along the lines of being able to trust only your close friends. Within a group of friends, everyone is always telling each other things, many of which are meant to be kept within the group and not talked about with others. One of the people in the group was dealing with a conflict in his life, and he was talking about it with his group of friends expecting to make him feel better and the group to keep it to themselves. One of the ended up going and talking to other people about it, causing the problem that the group member was dealing with to increase greatly and make it much more difficult for him. This story just shows how some people can be close friends and be there for you, while others can end up turning against you and not being real and true friends.

WHY DO PEOPLE CURSE?

Today we live in a society where cursing and using profanity is becoming more and more common. It exists in a very wide range of age groups, from the elderly, to the average adults, to teenagers, and sometimes even in younger children. It seems really sad to me that people have to use profanity in their everyday lives, and its even worse when you see people who start curing at such young ages. With cursing becoming so common, what is the reason people actually curse? Well to start out with, kids are obviously not taught curse words directly by their parents, but they usually hear it around and get the idea of what they mean. They could hear the words from T.V. shows or movies, or just other adults saying them, sometimes even their own parents use them.

Is cursing always out of anger?

Everyone says that anger is what causes people to curse and use profanity. I understand that people can start using a lot of profanity when they are furious with their reason pretty much being that it relieves stress. Its similar to the idea that if you get hurt really badly all of a sudden, a reaction would be to shout out a curse word. Although curse words and profanity relieving stress may be true, it has a much more negative impact than a positive one. When you are upset at something and you start cursing, it makes you lose your temper and usually also sounds very immature. Another reason is that even if you start out by only cursing and using profanity every once in a while when something really big happens, it starts to increase and you start to use it more. It loses its meaning to you and causes you to start using it so much to the point where it is used in every sentence. The best way to deal with a difficult situation is to remain calm and stay away from cursing, since it is a bad influence to others, it could be hurtful to others, and it will only cause you to use a lot more profanity.

THINK ABOUT WHAT YOU HAVE

No one has everything, and no one has nothing, which means that everyone has at least something. Obviously, everyone has heard the phrase that you should be grateful for what you have, but everyone hears and says that, but do people actually act upon it? I think that many people misinterpret the saying that they you should be happy with what you have and not be jealous of what others have and you don’t. Of course you should be happy with what you have, but that does not mean that you cannot get more. If you see something that you do not have but think that you really want it and need it, you can still try to get it. There is a difference between being jealous of someone because of what they have, and seeing something that you want and working and trying to get it in a proper manner. Effort is key.

Be HAPPY with what you have!

Anything can be achieved if it is worked for. A story that always comes to my mind when I think about working hard to get something or achieve a goal is a story that my father told me about when he first came to the United States. He to the United States completely by himself with the rest of his family living on the other side of the world, and he was only seventeen years old. He came here and he saw that everyone around him had a car, but he did not. A quick summary of what happened was that he ended up looking for any jobs that he could find, going through three or four different jobs, and was finally able to earn enough money for a car. He put in a lot of effort into finding a job and working it well, along with doing well in his college education. This story inspires me and shows that if you work hard enough you can do—. It is right that you should be happy with what you have, but you can always work hard to get more.