Student Blogs

Summer of ’13 so far – School starting up soon, Life at the Y

August 26th, 2013 ddluu15

Hi Friends!

So my summer so far has been mainly working at the YMCA and just playing with my friends from home. Nothing too much exciting right? Well you would think so but I’ve done a lot of fun stuffs, like I recently just got a fire pit at my house and then we had smores which were delicious.  I’m half excited to go back and start school and half not today. I want to continue the Ignorant Bliss I’m in; enjoying life and being with my friends and not looking at reality of life after HC and so forth.

My job at the YMCA, has been really awesome so far as I’ve gotten back to teaching my parent child classes in the smaller pool at the Y. I’ve socialized with all my parents and I learned a lot about their lives and jobs while teaching them about how their child is going to progress through their swimming life. It was awesome to work with my parents and their kids to see the amount of progress they made in my class. Some of the kids went from deathly crying and afraid of the water to being able to get in on their own, no crying and no clinging to mom/dad. I had other kids who were afraid to get their faces wet to willing jump in and get their face wet and being able to swim on their own with no help. (mind you this is all 18month-3year old babies). It was awesome teaching this class again in the summer.

I’ve also taught my adaptive lessons again and had one child this session. His name was Eric and he is a low verbal and shy person but he impressed me so much this swimming session. The first day of class I spent and hour and 15minutes in a small pool just warming up to him and getting him to do the basics. The next couple of lessons he progressed really fast, from someone who would only stay in the shallow end of the small pool to someone who would jump, get his face wet and swim on his own in the big pool and we even started working to get him to use a three bubble instead of four to help him swim better!

On Fridays I teach the regular lessons and I have kids from all ages around 3-9 with all different levels of swimming ability and each of my kids who came back each week significantly improved, and the beginners I had all passed on to the next class and I even had some of my kids start to swim without any help.I’ve also started shadowing and learning how to teach adult lessons so when I come back for breaks I can help out the Y in teaching adult lessons. Adults are also super fun to work but also very challenging because of the immense amount of fear they have with the water. However, they’re a great group and really fun to work with when they start to get comfortable and you’re able to see themselves improve their swimming and getting over their fear of the water.

Going back to school, I’m going to miss all of these kids, adults, parents, and Eric in my time at Holy Cross. I’m also going to miss working at the Y and child watch where I would just play with the kids while mum or dad worked out or went to zumba. However, once I come back I’ll see my same kids older and doing much more than when I had them which is going to be awesome to say hi. While I was working in the summer I saw a lot of kids I already had before in previous lessons years ago, but now that they’re older and I ask if they remember me most of them don’t. I don’t take it personally, but I find it amazing how fast they can grow.

Other than hanging out with my friends, playing video games, that’s been most of what I did at the YMCA in Woburn. I hope your summer has been well and you start an amazing school year.

Best,
Dan Luu

One Response to “Summer of ’13 so far – School starting up soon, Life at the Y”

  1. Godlove says:

    Great post
    Write more
    You are good.

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