Items

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  2020-03-13

  Body Building: Covid Edition

  In the years leading up to the Covid-19 Pandemic, I was working out 6 days a week. I was trying to build muscle in hopes to do a bodybuilding competition in the near future. I was making significant progress in the final months of the gyms being open and then it all changed. The Covid-19 spread became increasingly of concern and the world was going into panic. Then all the schools got sent home, I was home for a week before the gyms closed indefinitely. It was unknown how long everything was going to be closed down. There was no way that I was going to go weeks or months without the gym, I had come too far. Bodyweight exercises were not going to do the trick. I needed real weights to preform good muscle building exercises. The following day after the gyms closed, I drove to a local sports store and bought the last power rack, bench and barbell they had. This wasn't totally ideal like a real gym is, but it was enough for me to keep progressing. I was very fortunate to obtain these weights and rack because most people didn't and had nothing to work with. I lost no progress, and I am so grateful for that.
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  2021-01-31

  Having fun Online

  Due to Coronavirus I was not able to see my friends so long so we had to come up with ways to have fun online like these self timer photo competitions. They were really fun and it is how we spent a lot of our time at home alone.
• 
  2021-01-22

  Night Sprints

  We have a balance beam upstairs. Since quarantine, we’ve added a trampoline and a tumble trak. All the years of vowing to have my daughter only due gymnastics at the gym has ended because she hasn’t set foot in the gym since March 2020. Even a few months ago, we were talking about having her return in the fall, but with the spike that started in October, there was no way. I want to support her the best I can, because she is passionate about her sport. Even though she is never going to be an Olympian or collegiate gymnast, she does well at our local and state meets and continuing to practice everyday (even on the days she complains) gives her that light she needs at the end of the tunnel. The knowledge that when this ends, she can return to the world of competitive gymnastics and all her friends on her team is one of the things that keeps her going. But I’m not a gymnastics coach. Until quarantine, I didn’t know what half the skills were. And we have no bars, and no vault. But there is one thing I can do - run. I figure the practice videos, (thanks Paul Hamm and Amanda Borden), the twice a week live zoom practices (thank you Kazio Acrobatics & Gymnastics, who, though not being my daughter’s gym and being 400 miles away, graciously extended their online classes to anyone in the country when this all began), and the at home training schedule of conditioning and skills her gym sent in March takes care of the floor and the beam. Bars is a lost cause, I hope some muscle memory remains for her. But the vault, which is her highest scoring event, is powered by running. I love running, and her coach used to tell me that gymnasts notoriously hate running, but it is a skill that really helps with vaulting. I figured I may not be able to do a back handspring, but I can teach my kid to run. So three times a week, I make her run. She is NOT a fan of the mile on the treadmill, but she seems to genuinely enjoy sprinting. On Friday, she was bummed because it got dark before she could make it out to sprint. So to make it fun, we figured we’d just sprint in the dark with lights. Was I secretly trying to train her to hold a baton? Maybe. Or maybe I’m just trying to keep hope alive for the kid. She’s 10, and before Covid, the longest stretches she has had from the gym is two weeks, and that is only when we go on vacation. So she basically has lived at that gym since the summer before she was 3. If she wants to continue competing, I will do anything I can to keep those muscles in shape so she can return. And if I end up training a new running partner in the process, what a win.
• 2020-12-11

  Before the Covid-19 Lockdown

  Life was normal. I would go to school in the morning, at school nothing was out of the ordinary. Before class started everyone would be gathered together talking to their friends without any concern for a disease to be spreading. I swim as a sport and also play soccer. So, on weekends competitions happened regularly. I had a swim meet in February of 2020, it was an indoor meet and there were many people there. It was a normal swim meet and it was great. Then, weeks later on the last day of in person school everything was different. Some people still congregated into groups to talk, however others like myself had heard on the news of a spreading virus and tried to maintain what was a new term at the time "social distancing." This small change indicated many new changes to come.
• 2020-12-10T10:52:28

  My Life Before Covid and How I Found Out

  My life before Covid-19 was going very well. I was traveling for competitions and doing sports, actually going to school in person normally, and I was able to see the rest of my family. I was very happy, and then everything began to fall apart. Back in January, I found out about the virus, and how it was in China. Everybody thought that it was a joke and we would all laugh when someone talked about it, but we never thought that it would spread to the USA, or cause an emergency global pandemic. I was actually at a competition the weekend before everything shut down, completely unaware of what was about to happen. We got home from the competition and the next day at school, I began to hear that other schools were shutting down and canceling school temporarily. That is when it all hit me. Our school was shutting down, stores were shutting down, restaurants were shutting down, everything was closed, and I thought that the world was ending. Who knew that right after coming back from a normal competition and a regular life that everything was changing. I definitely didn’t. The worst and funniest part about everything shutting down in an emergency rush, was the outage of toilet paper. Everyone was stalking up on toilet paper, for a reason I am not aware of, causing almost all stores and online websites to be completely out of it. People began to panic for this reason, and that is when people began to hoard things like dry foods, toilet paper, water, and that is when getting essential items became a huge struggle. Everyone basically had to fight to get the things they needed. Covid-19 changed the whole world, and it was definitely not expected.
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  2020-10-14

  Competition and Efficency in America

  Competition and Efficiency in America The American economy is built on competition. Everything from business to education has an aspect of competition embedded in it. This goes hand in hand with efficiency because competition is the reason that America is so efficient. Americans have a way of working towards their goals, and a mindset of making themselves better off for the future, instead of right now. For instance, historically the arts have been valued above other subjects such as law and medicine. However in aAmerica law and medicine is studied for more than the arts because that is where the money is. In an American's eyes, more money is a better future for your family yourself. America is currently and always has lived up to the core values of competition and efficiency because of the way that the American people work to achieve their goals to succeed in this country. There are many ways that competition and efficiency are built into the United States education system. It plays a role in the American classroom from grade school to college. One of the most significant changes that the American people have made to education is the way that they value the arts. As in they don’t. The arts used to be praised in Europe, and artists were looked at like royalty. They were paid large sums of money to paint everything from portraits to creating sculptures. However ever since colonizing the United States, art has been on a decline. According to The National Center for Education Statistics, in the last 15 years the amount of people who study art related topics in college has gone down from about 15% to about 5%. The primary focus of study is health professions. The amount of students who study health professions has gone up 175% in the last 15 years. That is because a career path as a doctor will pay a lot more, and will lead to a better future than a career as an artist. The competitive drive of Americans is what makes them want this better future. They want to outperform their peers and better themselves, and this makes America more efficient. Americans have found a way to work competition into every aspect of their lives. Everything from education to business has been improved by them in order to better themselves. That drive to be the best is what makes Americans so successful. That drive to be the best can be seen by looking at unemployment rates of the last 10 years. Unemployment rates range everywhere from about 28% to about 0.1%. In 2009 America had an unemployment rate of 9.1%. All it took was 10 years for Americans to turn 9.1% into 4.2% (Knoema Corporation). As of 2019 America had cut their unemployment rate in half. What this means is that in 10 years 4.9% of the population was no longer unemployed. This is 4.9% of Americans who are competitively driven to improve their future, improve their education, and make sure that their families and themselves are better off. The more that Americans improve themselves, the more efficient the country will be. The core American values of competition and efficiency can be seen in the way that Americans want to improve in order to be better off in the future. The more that Americans use this competitive drive to succeed, the more efficient the country will be. So far America has not shown any signs of letting go of this competitive mindset, therefore it has lived up to these values and will continue to do so. The mindset of Americans is like the mindset of no other country. It is a mindset that is not afraid to let go of the way things are usually done in order to create new and better ways to do them. This mindset results in competitiveness within ourselves and between our peers. This competition results in a more efficient way of life.
• 2020-04-25

  Robotics In Quarentine

  I am on a world level competitive robotics team with 6 other students at schools across my city. We compete locally and at the world level in a robotics competition released by VEX every year. With a different set of rules every year it's a big challenge to keep up with it but, we all love it. This is one if not the most important thing to me in my life. I put a lot of time, effort and money into it as it is my passion. Last season (April 2019- April 2020), I put around 2,000 hours into the robot. I absolutely love it and I would attach a video of my robot but the file is too big which is why I picked the youtube reveal for the game. It introduces the game and generally summarizes the rules. This season, what I have done during our “summer break” most people would play video games or watch Youtube but I build, program and work on the engineering notebook. It has helped keep me relatively sane and helped me pass the time and keep me from being extremely bored. What I have submitted is the reveal for the game this year. It shows how the game is played what it’s called and everything else about it.
• 
  2020-08-11

  'Keeping the culture alive’: Native dance goes digital during pandemic

  By McKenzie Allen-Charmley|Luce Foundation: Southwest Stories Fellowship
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  2020-06-30

  Boston African American National Historic Site - Art of the Parks Prompt

  Twitter post from the Boston African American National Historic Site detailing their prompt for the #ArtofThePark contest. Participants are prompted to create a piece of art inspired by the site that illustrates the narrative of the BFNHS. Campaigns like this highlight how cultural heritages sites sought to engage with their audiences during social distancing, and how they hoped to continue to have the public interact with the histories they commemorate.
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  2020-06-08

  No State, No Regionals

  My daughter was having the gymnastics season of her life in 2020, placing in every event at every meet, and even reaching #19 on America’s Top 100 for vault for her level. One of the last places we went before quarantine in March was a gymnastics competition and I remember being uneasy at the crowds and the fact that the girls used the same apparatuses and equipment throughout the day. No one else seemed concerned, and when I asked if State Championships were still happening, everyone looked at me like I was insane. Of course, two weeks later, everything shut down. She has now been away from gym for over three months - the longest she’s been without her coaches since she was 3 - and both State Championships and Regionals were cancelled. No word on whether there will even be a 2021 season. To keep up the morale of the team, her gym sent information about a virtual State Championship, where gymnastics could submit videos from previous meets and judges would watch and score. I submitted without telling her, because I wasn’t sure what to expect. When she received medals and a champion t-shirt in the mail because she scored 1st All Around for her level (first in every event) she looked happier than she has since quarantine began. It’s not USA Gymnastics sanctioned, so it doesn’t “count,” but to my daughter, it is as real as any in person meet and was exactly what she needed to have closure to what had been an amazing season. We don’t know when she’ll go back - her gym opened three weeks ago, but with numbers rising dramatically in our area, the risk isn’t worth it for us. Competitions are fun, and my daughter loves her sport and is extremely dedicated, but a healthy and alive daughter is way more important to us than medals in a coffin.
• 
  2020-06-23

  Fierce competition in the marketplace

  A meme posted about the cutthroat labor system in Peru, it's true that there's a lot of competition in certain sectors. In some cases, vendors barely make a profit because everyone is trying to offer the lowest price just to make the sale. I often had this conversation with my mother in law who sold clothing on consignment, I understand that consignment is a normal practice, but if you have to take a bus/taxi to someone's house 3 or 4 times to collect installments, the minimal profits you were making are essentially erased. Now that Peru is allowing some vendors to start selling again, it's once again a volatile and competitive environment because so many people have been without work and the basic necessities.
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  2020-06-18

  Military frustration

  This is a story about my recent frustration with the the military's choices during this pandemic.It is important to tell the military side of the story because the official policies presented by the Department of Defense are not always adhered to at the installations and their story needs to be told.
• 
  2020-05-31

  Staying In Shape

  Because of social distancing guidelines, many pools are closed. This forced many competitive swimmers like me to get creative in order to stay fit. In this photo, I am practicing in a pool with a cord suspending me because my backyard pool is less than half the length of the pool I usually practice in. As fortunate as I am to have a backyard pool, many other competitive swimmers who do not have access to a pool have to make the best of their resources in order to stay in shape. When pools begin opening up again and competitions start taking place, competitive swimmers have to be prepared to return and race other swimmers although they have been dealt different resources and advantages or disadvantages.