Acquisition of Skill: Dancing?

As you might've noticed... I have no clue what I'm doing when it comes to dancing. What-so-ever. That is why, between now and November 24, my amazing partner Allison Hunt and I will be learning how to swing dance. By the 24th of November, we will have mastered a swing routine. I think this is going to be awesome! I always have secretly wanted to learn to dance, and there's no cooler way to do it than a classy swing dance to one of my all-time favorite songs: Sing Sing Sing by Benny Goodman https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhyhP_5VfKM. Learning a new skill such as this will better myself and aid any sort of learning I do in the future; as I go about learning something so foriegn I will also aquire passive skills in regrards to picking up new things. In the future it would be pretty cool to have this unique skill under my belt and to show it off at weddings, parties, etc,. All I know is that very seldom do you come across or witness people that dance in this manner and this elegantly, and because it's so rare (or at least rare to me) it just makes it that much more incredible! Plus, swing music is fantastic and because it's so mildly unpopular in this day and age learning to dance to such "sick-nasty charts" makes this skill pretty unique.
This skill relates to me in the sense that the music and the age of this dance really applies to one of my many not-so-secret interests. I feel as if I'm being almost redundant, but jazz/swing music is extraordinary, and I'm excited to learn something so interrelated!
A thankyou to my best friend Allie Hunt for agreeing to do this with me and a thankyou to Mr. and Mrs. Davidson, our incredible dancing instructors/coaches!

Collaboration

The focused topic in Open this week was Collaboration. Basically we figured out how to work well in groups. This sounds easy enough, but in all reality, it's pretty difficult. Joining a group of people with a common goal at hand and discussing ways to accomplish your goal and then actually executing plans into action is a lot of work. People don't become successful collaborators over night. Group/People skills take time to really understand and get comfortable with; some adults still struggle with communicating in large groups or have trouble listening and are too egotistical to acknowledge other peoples' ideas. I thought that our instructors (the dynamic duo Mr. Glim and Mrs. Rad) did an excellent job demonstrating good and not-so-good collaboration, and teaching us how to be efficient and work efficiently in a group setting. We did an in-class activity that was super interesting. We had a setlist of charaters (hypothetical people)that we could group together to send off to start a new world on a differnet planet. The idea was to send people we thought would better civilazation and create an idealistic "new world". We worked invidualy at first, and over time grew in group size until the whole class was partisipant in the decison. Eventualy, after collaborating for some time, and exercising our collaborative skills, we came to conclusion. In the real world, you will always have to work with people that you do not necessarily like or want to work with. It is necessary to be able to collaborate with anyone and everyone you encounter; to be able to hear and understand them, and to make sure you are being heard and understood. Good collaboration skills are used in everyday life. Is it possible that by learning how to collaborate and how to deal with certain situations within a group setting I'll have a slight advantage over those who weren't as lucky? And is it possible that I, with my freshly obtained upper-hand in collaborating, will better understand the dynamic of a group, and overcome issues to achieve that common goal rather than those who may not be as educated in collaboration?