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Victor Krizan
Miss. Grant
UWRT 1101-032
Due Sept. 3
rd


More than Football
I grew up in Century Oaks Ct, which is a largely nice neighborhood in
Winston Salem. I was also fortunate enough to attend a private, Catholic grade
school and middle school. While attending St. Leos, I made many friends and
had a great time. However, if you could imagine, the ethnicity was primarily white
with a few exceptions. The point Im trying to make, is that until I started playing
football in 5
th
grade, I really never associated with piers from different upbringings
and races. I usually played with the same kids, from almost the same upbringings
as me. I never really started realizing how much I was missing in my life and how
blind I was to the rest of the world until I started my first couple of football
practices.
I started playing football in 5
th
grade, I wouldve started playing earlier but
my mom didnt want me to get hurt at a young age. The first team I played for
was the Forsyth County Broncos. Which was fairly diverse in the parents and
player who played there, compared to other local Pop Warner football teams. My
team consisted of many kids who I already knew from school or from little league
baseball. However, I did meet a lot of new people who seemed at the time to be
pretty cool. One kid in particular caught my eye, not only because he was African
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American, but from his outgoing and hilarious personality. His name was Reggie
and he played running back. Over the course of the season, we would practice
together, and he would come over to my house occasionally to hang out.
One day when we were hanging out, we went onto a computer and started
to look up random stuff. We eventually made it to YouTube and started looking
up random songs. He showed me a few of his favorite music videos, and one of
the songs he showed me got stuck in my head. So I had to download it so that I
could listen to it again. That was the first time I was introduced to Hip Hop. That
day was very influential, because from that point on my attitude and my
demeanor changed because I started listening to different music from people
with a different aspect on life and how to live. My music literacy had changed,
and it ended up changing some of my social literacy.
Now a day, all I listen to is Hip Hop, or Rap depending on my mood. Even
though it is primarily the most popular genre out now, for my generation, I
consider myself listening to more of the artist, rather than just the popular ones
on the radio like most of my fellow piers. Music is very influential, and has a great
impact on its listeners. That is why I consider this experience as an important
time in which my literacy was changed.
Summer Reading
Every summer, my middle school teachers would assign a summer
reading list where usually the students would have to pick three of the books on
the list and read them, then write a report answering the general questions
provided by the teacher. This always irked me, and I would always spark note the
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summary of the book then use that information to write the report. The reason
why I was never enchanted by these books was because they were usually very
boring, as well as I have never been a fan of fiction, which these books were
always. All of my teachers would always do this same old book report thing, until
I had a teacher who actually felt for us kids, and assigned us an interesting
summer project.
Instead of a reading assignment, our teacher who was crazy about biology
and sciences in general, had us create an experiment on whatever we wanted.
Being that I loved science, this project was going to be easy. However, when is I
started thinking about what I was going to do my project on, I couldnt think of
anything. I looked on line for good examples, however to me they all seemed
boring and unoriginal, such as Mentos and Coke. I was having the hardest time
deciding on what to do.
At the time, I was training at top-level sports training gym called Athletic
Republic. It wasnt your typical gym; in fact in my class there were three NFL
players, alone. We were instructed by the best for the best, and the equipment
used there was the best money could buy. I usually did Athletic Republic in the
summer right before football season, so that I would be faster and stronger for
the upcoming season. This gave me an idea; I should track my progress, from
how fast I can run to how much I can lift on a specific weight for the entire time
Im on this regiment.
So youre probably thinking that this is an easy experiment, however the
workouts at Athletic Republic arent your usual workouts. The treadmills are
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inclined and while you run on them they change the atmospheric pressure
around you with a breathing device to simulate high altitudes. We also did crazy
plyometric sessions, where we would wear weighted vests and have elastic
straps on our legs to add weight. The trainers there always tracked my times and
my amounts after each interval or set, so that made it easier for me to calculate
my results. This experiment was intriguing to me because it was based off of me
and off of something I loved to do, so this project was fun for me, compared to
the standard book report.
The reason why this ads to my literacy is that I fell in love exercise
sciences and I now want to be an orthopedic specialist, which deals with torn
tendon and broken bones and stuff like that. So that experience I had in sixth
grade impacted my thoughts and desires for the future and ended up contributing
to what I wanted to major in in college.
Mental Math
I went to a catholic middle school where there was one teacher who was a
nun. She taught first grade and collected toys to give to her students for
answering correct math questions. The toys were usually just Happy Meal toys or
small trinkets from Wal Mart. Although they were just little toys, it seemed like
everyone always wanted to win them, I guess it was just our age making us want
the toys, not the complexity of the toy itself.
Well, everyday her students would pack up to leave for the day fifteen
minutes before school would get out, so we could be ready to play her game
called mental math. What she would do is say numbers out loud, such as 32+16-
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3/2, and whoever answered the number write at the end of her usually five
number long problems would win one of the toys in her bin. We would usually
have time to play about five or six games before the end of school bell rang.
Anyways, everyones goal of course was always to win a toy, but my goal
was to win multiple toys and in order to win more than on toy, you would have
play double or nothing where if you won you got another toy, but if you lost, you
gave up the toy you had already won. In double or nothing, we would have to
solve multiplication problems and division problems.
Regardless if I got the problem right or wrong, I still understood the math
that my teacher was throwing at me and I was learning at a fairly young age. I
was also having fun and interacting using math, so it wasnt boring like most
traditional techniques of teaching are.
Since I was use to answering math problems at such a quick pace at my
young age, I have found that math is easier for me than most people my age and
my first grade teacher contributed to my abilities. My math literacy was generated
at an early age, and since I used it to get things I wanted, I grew to love math and
realize today that I still like math classes more than classes such as history and
English.