I nearly died in completing this assignment.

(I'm very sorry about the late post, everyone. I guess what happened was that for some reason with all the videos and pictures I had in here, the schedule feature didn't work the way it was supposed to. I've put the text up now, so you can at least see something, but I can't get anything to upload at the moment, and I'll have to try to put the pictures and videos back in when I can go find a better internet connection. Sorry for the inconvenience; I guess this is what I get for taking a class that forces me to learn a whole new medium.) 

I’m pretty good at a lot of things. Maybe that’s not particularly humble of me to say, but it’s true. However, I am not good at everything. This week is proof.

I enlisted my 15-year-old brother, Bennett, to teach me something about an area of folk knowledge I had never previously attempted: break dancing. 

Bennett began learning break dancing a few years ago, from friends in his gym class. “I thought it looked really cool, so I asked them to start showing me how to do what they did,” Bennett said. He would learn moves from his friends, and then go home and spend hours practicing them on the grass in the front yard, on the driveway, or on the wooden floor of our parents’ house. Our mom didn’t like him practicing on the hard floor, because he would get so bruised and beat up, and our dad didn’t like him practicing on the front lawn, because he was wearing holes in the grass. Luckily, as his dancing improved, the bruises became less frequent and his lawn care responsibilities became less time-consuming.

The first thing Bennett taught me (or attempted to teach me) was the basic six-step, which you can see in this video that Bennett made.

It involved a lot of flopping around on the floor, sort of like a progression from downward dog to a crab walk and back again. I did okay at this one, I guess. I just wasn’t as fast as him. (I don’t own a video camera, so sorry, but you only get pictures of me.)

Next, Bennett showed me how to top rock. I really like his handstand-thing in this video:

I had to take this one slow and try to figure out the steps piece by piece. I think I was just starting to get it.

 

Lastly, Bennett showed me how to do a windmill. This is one of those crazy-looking break dance moves that you see in movies.

I nearly died trying this, and I still need a lot of work before I can take this one to the dance floor.

I had a great time attempting to break dance with my brother, but I think I’ll stick to baking and rock climbing and applying to law school for now.

“Just keep trying it,” Bennett told me. “But you’ll have a lot of bruises before you’re any good.”