How Taekwondo Affects School

Taekwondo and school are both big parts of my life. Both make me who I am and affect how I act and what I do. If I am having a bad day at school I will go to taekwondo to calm down and focus. If taekwondo is particularly hard one day then school will be a bit of a relief. There are many ways that school and taekwondo affect each other. Homework is the most obvious example. When I have a lot of homework at night, I will have to skip taekwondo. If I have to go to taekwondo to prepare for a competition, I will have to either email my teachers to ask for an extension or stay up late trying to finish. Staying up late makes me more tired at school so I get less done causing more homework for me at night and the endless cycle begins. To break this cycle I would have to skip taekwondo, therefore decreasing my chance of doing well in a competition.

Taekwondo competitions are a whole other story when it comes to school. They are on the weekends which makes them big homework conflicts. Thankfully, they normally only take one day out of the weekend but it’s still a lot of wasted time. The taekwondo is not the boring part. The boring part is all of the waiting. My most recent competition was on February 3rd and it was the Oregon state championship and national qualifier. My group was scheduled to compete at 1:00pm along with three other events. There were only three rings in the whole place so everything took longer because there was limited space. I arrived at 12:00pm, as instructed, and proceeded to warm up. At 1:00pm I went into the staging area but my division hadn’t been called yet. I watched my friends compete, and cheered them on, but I still wasn’t called. At 3:30pm we were finally called to start competing. I went 2nd. In total, I spent 5 1⁄2 hours at the competition. I was competing for only 3 minutes of that time. Of course I had fun watching my teammates, but I also wasted over 5 hours that I could have been doing homework.

Taekwondo affects school as much as vice versa and not only because of the homework. Taekwondo changes how I’m viewed at school. When someone asks me what sports I do, I usually
answer, “Taekwondo and soccer.” Most of the time, the kid who wanted to know proceeds by trying to talk to me about soccer. I think this happens because most kids either play soccer or

watch it and therefore find it a comfortable talking point. If I had just said taekwondo then the kid probably would have said “Cool,” and moved on to another topic. This is because a lot of people don’t know what taekwondo is and find it weird and foreign. If I just said that I played soccer then I would be viewed as “normal.” Since I have decided to respond with both of my hobbies, some kids will inevitably think of me as “the girl who does taekwondo” if they don’t know me very well.

I love taekwondo so I don’t care what it does to my life in school. It will always be a part of who I am even if I don’t do it as much in the future. It will be a fond memory for me and I will look back on how much I enjoyed it.

Example of one of my taekwondo competitions: https://youtu.be/RZGjS-7ppLw 
Photo credit for 1st pic
Photo credit for 2nd pic

Procrastination, Volleyball, and Homework, Oh My!

As a middle school student, a volleyball player, and a kid who loves to waste all her time online, I like to procrastinate, all the time. I feel guilty when I do, but I love not doing my work. There are so many other things I could do like: watch TV, eat, watch hours of netflix, go on the world of youtube, and a million other things. How do teachers expect us that out of the billions things I could do they want us to pick the one thing we hate the most. Homework.

I play club volleyball which can make me extremely busy. The practices are twice a week and an hour and a half each. Now I know I should not be complaining because some people have it much worse, but what bugs me the most is that almost every weekend I have a twelve hour tournament. This can consist of eight to ten hours of straight volleyball! This means there is NO time for homework! Just to my luck it seems that I always have a volleyball tournament the weekend before a big test or a big project is due. When I get home from a volleyball tournament I don't want to do homework. To tell you the truth it's probably the thing I want to do least. That is one of my number one ways I procrastinate: being too busy and tired.

When I go to practice I sometimes get "volleyball homework" it's not really homework but it’s close. I sometimes will be told to do a certain amount of sets or bumps. Or sometimes I'll have to work on my approach and block jump. The thing is with volleyball homework I do it. I love volleyball so I love volleyball homework! So sometimes I'll work on homework just not school homework.

To help with my procrastination I try to do whatever I can. I will try to plan my whole day, I try to work on one thing at a time, or l will even try the rule of six. For the rule of six I write down six things that I want to get done. I put them in order if importance and I get to work! If I don't finish everything then it just gets moved to the next list tomorrow. But to find the thing that works the best for you you just have to keep trying new things and maybe one day you will cure your procrastination forever

The thing is with procrastination you never know when you will find a way to cure your procrastination. Hopefully I will find a way to cope with my busy life and work hard in school.