Service Update

This years service has been very challenging for me as historically i have been very reluctant to involve my self with things that have to do with actively interacting with people in particular students. This meant that attempting to teach children chess was and still is undertaking a new challenge. At first me teaching partner, Sadira, and I were unsure of how to proceed with the teaching when we we could not communicate cross language barriers and were unsure of our opponent's level of knowledge. In the end we decided to play out a test game, two against two, and realized that they knew the pieces movements quite well but lacked strategy. Since then we have been playing quite high level games but instead of letting them make mistakes pointing out flaw in their strategy either with Sadira's limited sinhala or piece movement demonstrations. Their strategy even in the few weeks since we started has shown a marked improvement. Additionally interacting with them has given me a pace to practice my even more minimal sinhala. 

Sense the seem to be improving so markedly we hope that eventually they will be able to take their skills out into their communities and teach others. As our communication is getting better we hope to soon undertake the new challenge of teaching them how to teach chess.

Action Update

In the last few weeks our basket ball team has made some mazing improvements. We started out loosing every single one of the sudden death matches but by the end of last weeks session we had won three in a row (the longest streak of every team) and played the longest sudden death game yet (10 minutes). I think what really pushed us forward was that we insisted on playing and using all five of our team members rather than relying on heavy hitters. this meant that at first we played weakly because as a whole our sense of where people were going to be was weak but as we learned how our teammates played and started passing better our results improved immensely. We as a team dominated because we worked collaboratively with each other.

Individually, I have been steadily increasing my awareness of my strengths and areas for growth. I know that I am good at passing and quite good at seeing gaps in the lay that I can fill. However, I didn't make any meaningful shots during game play. My warm up shots are getting better but I still find my self scared to make them when my team is relying on them even when I am in optimum position to do so.  This weak my goal is to continue to practice my shorts during the warm up and making shots during game is my next challenge.