Assignment 7

When I was three my dad got me my first pair of skates. He has always said that I was born to skate. My dad tells me that the first time he put the skates on me he turned around to talk to someone and when he looked back he saw that I had gotten up on my own and started skating around in circles. I don’t remember ever having to learn or practice skating, it just came naturally. When I was five I started playing hockey, and it to came every naturally to me. When I was about eight or nine I saw a high school ice hockey game, before the game started all the players came out on the ice and started shooting slap shoots. It was the coolest thing that I had ever seen, I wanted more than anything in the world to be able to shoot a puck like that.
The next day I made a target in my garage so I could learn how to shoot a slap shot. I already had a pretty good shot so I thought learning how to hit a slap shot would be easy, I was very wrong. I must have shot a million times without any success. I would even watch old taped hockey games in slow motion to try to figure out what I was doing wrong (Apprentice - the tendency to look to others for insight and guidance). After a few months with little success my dad signed me up for a class that taught only shooting. The guy who taught the class was a retired NHL hockey player. Using the concept of scaffolding he was able to teach me to do a slap shot by building on the wrist shot that I could already do. Just a few pointers made all the difference.