Skip to main content

Soccer

I really like soccer. I remember when I was sixteen, playing soccer for my high school team. We were playing one of our rivals. I was a substitute, so less was expected of me than many of the others on the team. It was during the first half, and I got hold of the ball near the goal. Already so close, I had merely to tap it in. After I did, I received the greatest praise I believe I've ever received in my life, then and since. My teammate picked my up and carried me halfway across the field.

At a different game, I ran up to a player much larger than me. About five to seven feet from me, he kicked the ball directly toward me. It struck me directly on the face. Numb and disoriented, I walked away and was yelled at by a teammate who must not have seen what happened (or who thought it wasn't that bad).

I guess we all have our good and bad days!
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Persuasion

At different points in history, governments have devoted men, women, and resources to try to persuade others to their side. One significant example of this occurred in Germany under Adolf Hitler. Hitler knew how important it was to make sure the German people were on his side as leader of the country. One way he did this was by controlling what people heard. Specifically, near the beginning of World War II, Hitler made it a crime for anyone in Germany to listen to foreign radio broadcasts. These were called the “extraordinary radio measures.” He did this to ensure that Germans weren’t being persuaded by enemy countries to question their loyalty to Hitler. He knew that a German listening to a radio broadcast from Britain might persuade that German to believe that Great Britain was the good guy and Hitler the bad guy. This was so important, in fact, that two people in Germany were actually executed because they had either listened to or planned to listen to a foreign radio broadcast (one...
Post a Comment
Read more

Comparison

Psychologists and others have studied ways in which we compare ourselves to each other. One man named Leon Festinger argued that we tend to compare ourselves to other people when we don’t know how good or bad we are at something (like football or playing the guitar). One way we do this is when we compare ourselves to those who are not as good as we are, to protect our self-esteem (called “downward social comparison;” example: we’re playing basketball and miss most of our shots, but we feel okay because a teammate wasn’t even given the ball). Another comparison we make is when we compare ourselves to others who are doing much better than we are (called “upward social comparison”). When we see others who appear to be doing better than we are, we can respond by trying to improve ourselves, or by trying to protect ourselves by telling ourselves it’s not that important. There was a study published in 1953 by Solomon Asch, who asked students to take part in a “vision test.” The par...
Post a Comment
Read more

Thoughts on Academic Purpose

If I could tell my students how to choose a path of employment, I would emphasize that no effective writer, historian, athlete, musician, or scientist became such without dedicating themselves to some goal. For that to have taken place, however, the respective expert must have had a firm idea about why they were doing what they were doing. In other words, they must have had purpose. Karl Marx spent countless hours in English libraries, I would share, to understand the functioning of society in order to improve it; while Isaac Newton often went without food to gain a firmer grasp of the science of motion, and eventually revised that science. They did this because they had a clear purpose, a real reason for doing what they were doing that would affect others around them. I would communicate that whatever passion students tap into, it should be embarked upon with that kind of clear goal in mind. While they may not know which passions they have yet, I would emphasize that school is a time ...
Post a Comment
Read more