Juggling

Over the weekend, I went to my cousin's wedding with my parents and brother. The next morning my dad and I were chatting about psychology related stuff and he started telling me about this workshop/seminar that he attended years ago in which he learned to juggle. As long as I can remember my dad has been able to juggle balls, toys, beanbags, or other three of a kind items (not like chainsaws or anything dangerous). Even after not juggling for several years, he picked up three tennis balls on Saturday and started juggling as if he juggled every day. Anyway, juggling was a metaphor at this workshop and everyone at the workshop basically learned to juggle over the cross of 4 or so days. And I got thinking to myself that the juggling metaphor might be useful in my teaching, especially for my classes with freshman (and also, how cool will it be to have the students like "woah! that's the juggling professor!" why didn't they have a class in grad school on juggling!?!?)

So I've been practicing since Saturday. After three days of practicing, starting with just one ball, then two balls, I'm up to three balls. I'm not continuously juggling. More like right left right. Sometimes I can do a right left right left, and on a few rare occasions a right left right left right. Each day I've practiced for about 60 - 90 minutes. And it involves a lot of dropped balls (A LOT of dropped balls).

It is really difficult to take pictures of yourself juggling. Those first two pictures are the only two in which I actually appear to be juggling (appear being the key word). Most of my attempts still look like this...

In which at least one ball is not in the plane that it ought to be. My first two or three tosses are typically ok, and then I get excited and start throwing the balls wildly. My dad said to practice standing in front of a wall so that you can't toss them too far away. That's been helping, but still...

If I ever get to full fledged juggling, I'll get Kevin to take a video for y'all!