*** Please note that this is a loooong post, and I wrote parts of it on 5 different days!***
So my spring semester is off to a rolling start...and as great as it is...I feel like I'm about to get hit with a brick. I'm working hard to just barely keep up with everything! Don't get me wrong, I LOVE every single thing that is occupying my time...but it's ALL happening at one time. Stay tuned to learn about what's going in my life right now!
1) Cardiorespiratory Function and Exercise: My one "class" that I'm taking- the workload is not too bad at all so far. Learning a lot about the air and oxygen we breathe...how much air can we hold? How much can we move it during exercise? How efficiently do we use it? Can we improve? How do we use it? How does disease affect it? Lots of cool labs that we do to quantify and measure this stuff...This class meets Tuesday nights for 3 hours...I would say on average I've been spending 2-3 hours outside class workin on homework, quizzes, and labs.
2) Independent Study- American College of Sports Medicine Health and Fitness Instructor Certification (ACSM-HFI cert.): This a well-respected exercise professional certification- one of the toughest in the business, so as I enter the professional field, this certification will label me as a well-rounded and educated candidate...For credit, I am to summarize 12 of the 188 KSA's (knowledge, skills, and abilities) that the certification test will cover, and email these summaries to my faculty advisor each week. This is much more work than I thought it would be! Instead of a single definition, concept, or explanation per KSA, each one is very broad....Each group of summaries range takes me about 5-8 pages to cover. The studying and writing probably takes about 3-4 hours total- I've concluded that I will doing these last minute, every week.
3) Graduate Assistantship- I teach undergraduate level activity classes to offset the costs of my tuition and to receive a small stipend each month...Three days a week I teach aerobics (Oh yes, the whole "grapevine with a clap" deal) and four times per week I teach Personal Fitness. Aerobics...goodness. I NEVER was coordinated, until they asked me to replace a GA who left last year! I freaked out...but I learned, and got an AFAA group fitness certification, and now I'm an old pro. I'll show YOU how to mambo! I was even featured in the Pantagraph for my skills. Aerobics is one of the more time-consuming GA positions, because you actually have to plan and practice what you are doing, make up routines, etc...as opposed to say volleyball, where the students play each other. I like it though, I get some fun "cross-training" in =). I am required to assign some homework and tests, but that only takes up maybe 1 or 2 hours outside of class (2 if I start making up new workouts or routines- I spent A LOT of time doing that last year, so I have enough material to cover me this year =) )
Personal fitness is a cool class too- It's a 3 credit class, the students go to lecture 2x/wk with Karen Dennis, one of the Ex Phys professors, and they learn about health, disease, nutrition, exercise and diet programming, then they go to lab 2x/week with ME, and I do their pre/post fitness assessments as well as lead them through a whole bunch of different workouts - I love the variety and the workouts- I have all different fitness levels and interests, so I get to be creative when I make them up! Now if it was just working out and attendance, it would be a breeze - however, I have to have SOMETHING to grade...grrrrr...so that means I am bombarded with a bunch of silly "labs" that they get out of workbook- it's not hard to grade, just time consuming. So I have 2 sections of this class, meaning I teach it 4x/week, 1 hr each, then the grading....
STAY TUNED FOR PART 2
4) GA - ONLINE PERSONAL FITNESS
5) THESIS DATA COLLECTION
6) PART TIME JOB AT 4 SEASONS
7) ***TRAINING***
No comments:
Post a Comment