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Week X: 11/6-11/10

This is my first update in a while. I've been practicing, but not as much or as consistently as I'd like, and I haven't kept track of my progress as well as I'd like. (I lost one week because of a cold.) So have I progressed since my last post? I've been keeping track of my shooting percentages informally. I've had some good outings and bad outings. Without the exact numbers, it's too hard to say whether my shooting accuracy has increased. This is on me. I should have kept track better.  Solution : I'll start bringing a notebook with me to write down how many shots of each kind I make. Up to now, I've been just remembering my percentage until I wrote a blog post. My impression is that, if I've improved at all, it's been a very slight improvement.  Solution : For this reason, I'm going to increase the number of practice shots I take during each practice session. I was doing 30 of each kind (off a single dribble, from the top of the key). I
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Week 3 - 10/3 and 10/5 - Resilience

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This post is for the last two weeks, because I got sick last week and had to take a break from practice (and from writing). It feels like I'm making progress, but it's slow. In recent practices, I shot, from the top of the key, 9/30, 12/30, and 6/30. So no progress there, which is a bit frustrating and discouraging. This brings up one of the big challenges of skill building: resilience . Although progress is slow (or even non-existent), I can't let my frustration about that negatively impact my practice. I bet some of you reading this have had similar experiences with learning something in college. I haven't lost faith in my practice methods for three reasons: I was still a bit sick when I shot 6/30. Being sick could have negatively impacted my shooting and cost me several baskets. There's an element of randomness in how well I shoot on any given day. So I need to look at longer trends in my shooting numbers before concluding that I'm not making progress. I feel
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Week 1 - first week: 9/20 and 9/22

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9/20 I hadn't had the chance to research new techniques or drills. But I went to the court this morning and started working on two skills: shooting from the "top of the key" (about 20 feet from the basket) and dribbling and shooting with my left hand. I took 30 shots from the top of the key and made 20 of them. That's way higher than I expected. I'll keep practicing this shot, over and over and keep track of my percentage over time. And here's my practicing dribbling and finishing left: Watching this video made me very concerned about the discrepancy between how fast I think I'm moving and how fast I'm really moving (in other words, it made me feel old). I'll keep practicing this until I can go faster and score with my left-hand at a higher percentage. 9/22 I found this video on one of the main goals I set myself, improving my pull-up jump shot (going quickly from dribbling to shooting): This reminded me of an important aspect of skill learning tha
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Getting Started

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I asked my students to pick a skill for me to learn this semester and the people have spoken: I'll be learning basketball! (I'm a big basketball fan, so I'm looking forward to this.) My idea for this is to illustrate the different aspects of learning a skill. We've identified three main aspects: coaching/teaching, community, and deliberate practice . My students will see me learn basketball through these aspects and they learn critical thinking and philosophy through the same aspects. Learning critical thinking is similar to learning any other skill. So to get started, I need coaching/teaching, that is, someone to explain to me how to get better at basketball. There are a lot of YouTube channels on this. Here are a bunch of channels that people have recommended. If there's one you recommend, let me know in the comments. I'm planning to try a few out and see what I like best. I'll get drills to deliberately practice from my coach/teacher. Community is a toug
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