April 21st, 2012 | Uncategorized
Hi guys,
How’s everything going? Things here have been pretty good. The sun’s been out, there hasn’t been much rain, people are happy and you can really feel like summer’s a few weeks away! Things this week have been very quiet. I’ve been studying for my exams for the most part as we have three coming up next week. First one on being on Monday. Can’t wait!! Haha
I coached my girls at the National School this week. Both sessions went very well. These were pretty much my last sessions with the girls. So we spent the majority of the time doing some competitive layup and passing drills and finished things up with knockout. It was the first time these girls played knockout so it was very interesting to see!
The one thing I’ve come to realize when interacting with people that don’t know HOW to do a specific activity is that you really need to describe every single detail of the activity if you want it to go right.
A friend of mine once told me an interesting story. He was in one of his MBA classes one day and his professor showed up with a jar of peanut butter, one of jelly, a loaf of bread and a knife. He asked my friend if he’d be able to teach him how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich without acting it out. He could only describe the actions. My friend obviously said “of course I can, it’s pretty easy.”
So my friend starts describing how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He says “you take the bread, you put some jelly on one of the slices and you put some peanut butter on the other slice. And you have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich”. As my friend described this, the professor took the jar of peanut butter, picked up the loaf of bread, began putting the jar of peanut butter on the loaf, as my friend said and did the same with the jelly. As you can imagine, the professor wasn’t able to make a peanut and jelly sandwich with my friend’s instructions.
Long story short, the professor told the class that if you want something to be done the right way, you’d have to go down to the very basic of details. To make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, you would have to : pick up the peanut butter jar, twist the cap open, do the same with the jelly. Open the bag where the bread is and take two loafs out. Place them on the table. Take your knife, dip it in the peanut butter, make sure you’ve got some butter on it as you take it out of the jar. Place it on the bread. Do the same for the jelly. Once that’s done, you pick up one of the slices and put it on the other making sure both buttered sides are placed one on top of the other. Then you can take the knife and cut the sandwich in a linear fashion through the middle. And there you have it. A perfect peanut and jelly sandwich!
So basically the point of this story is just to show you that when teaching a group of kids how to do something, you can’t expect them to know what you mean when you say do a layup and make sure you hit the backboard at the proper angle.. what you need to do is make sure you teach them how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich first, before expecting them to do it the right way by themselves!
Talk again next week!
Will
