As it stands my senior project is progressing well. I have continued to teach alongside Luis Hernandez in almost all middle school PE classes from Monday morning at 8:30 am, to the last class on Friday afternoon ending at 2:45 pm. The few middle school PE classes I have been missing are those on Tuesdays and Thursday mornings as this is when the 4s, 4s k, and kindergarteners have their dance classes with Deborah Damast. The dance lessons run from 9 am to 11 am and I have continued to join Olivia Propp in these classes as they prepare for their performances in the coming weeks (something that has had to be rescheduled multiple times due to covid cases in the lower school). I’ve also continued teaching the 2nd through 3rd graders in their gymnastics classes with Elise Knudson, something that begins right after the last dance classes in the lower school.

Thankfully I can’t think of anything that hasn’t gone to plan, especially as I’ve started to begin filming for the documentary that I intend on presenting. I began filming B-roll for the documentary in the middle school badminton tournaments in which the students play small-sided in either 1v1 or 2v2 games. The rest of the students watch and cheer on which makes the games feel very intense. Other B-roll has included dodgeball games and basketball as these are classwide favorites for PE time. I have also begun filming my interviews for the documentary during the students’ recess time in the Houston street ball field. This has gone smoothly as the students were all very happy to participate and gave some thoughtful answers to the questions.

However, I recently found out that the final cut of the documentary, something that is to be shown on senior project presentation night, is only allowed to be 5-7 minutes long. Although this isn’t terrible, it does mean that it will be significantly shorter than I had imagined, and I have begun to think about making two copies of the documentary, one that is to be presented in 5-7 minutes, and another that students, parents, or teachers can watch in their own time, potentially reaching 20+ minutes. I have also learned a lot from my first few times recording interviews outside, specifically that it is much louder than I realized. The microphone that Stephen our film teacher is kindly letting me borrow is proving to do well but is also not ideal, a solution to this might mean that students simply need to hold the microphone when speaking, which isn’t the end of the world.

I continue to try and answer my research question: “What gets students at LREI interested and involved in sports within school?” but I’ve found that it isn’t really my end goal anymore. Although I would like to have some form of an answer to this question, I don’t expect that to be my overall mission as the documentary should be a great device for viewers to interpret an answer. What I understand as one answer from the students, might be interpreted as something completely different by someone else, so the goal of the short and or long documentary is to give people the opportunity to answer the question themselves. Potentially even at the senior project presentation.