The Bell House
  • Home
    • About THE BELL HOUSE
    • THE BOARD
    • Accolades & Reviews
  • Exchange Choreography Festival
    • CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS | EXCHANGE
    • 2019 CREATIVE TEAM
    • 2018 Festival Schedule >
      • Festival Location
  • NEWS
  • COMMUNITY
    • Oklahoma DanceFilm Festival
    • PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT >
      • Internships & Volunteer
  • Writings
    • BLOG
  • CONTACT & SUPPORT
    • Purchase Tickets
    • Donate
    • Gallery
  • Shop

DANCE IN THE MIX

fueling the generative nature of ideas.....

Enforced Cross Training

9/7/2017

0 Comments

 
Dance In The Mix welcomes Jessica Collier as our student guest blogger sharing the thoughts she has been developing during her undergraduate work at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, OK. ​​
Working with a Mandatory School Fitness Program
One of the many reasons I have found over the years to love my school is its focus on “Whole Person Education, Spirit, Mind, and Body.” Every student is held to high standards as a matter of policy: ORU actually has an attendance policy requiring students to physically attend class lectures, holds chapel twice a week (mandatory for all students, faculty, and staff), and requires all undergraduates to enroll in a physical education course each semester. Not everyone at school appreciates these requirements, but as a fairly motivated collegiate with any measure of school pride and the desire to succeed, I find very little to criticize in these policies.

If anything causes a stir among ORU students, however, it’s certainly the aerobics points/Fitbit/field test system that currently constitutes our physical education program. Many students find the performance standards (rumored on the university grapevine to be as tough as some military qualification scores) to be, at the least, daunting, if not downright impossible. Here’s a short breakdown of what every ORU student is expected to achieve each semester:

  • In the past, students have been expected to earn 50 “aerobics points” per week, incorporated into the grade of every PE class. Aerobics points are calculated via a complicated system involving a “target heart rate training zone” based on age and the number of 10-minute segments your heart rate stays in that zone. As a twenty-something, my heart rate training zone ranges from 120-180 beats per minute, meaning that 6 hours and 20 minutes at 120 bpm would get me 50 aerobics points, or 2 hours and 5 minutes at 180 bpm.

  • Currently, the old aerobics point system is being grandfathered out, replaced with a computer program connected to the Fitbits that every incoming freshman is now required to buy. On the Fitbit program, students are required to take 10,000 steps a day, and earn a specified number of “active minutes” per week at a certain heart rate. Both of these factors are incorporated into every student’s grade.

  • Every semester each student is required to run or walk a two mile (1.5 mile for first-semester freshmen) field test. For the first half of each semester, most PE classes focus exclusively on training for the field test, requiring students to run at least twice a week. According to the current standards, any time above an 8 or 9-minute mile constitutes a failing grade on the field test, and that number is factored prominently into the student’s grade for the entire class.

This is all fine and good – if you love running. As a dance student, I am still attempting to sift through the vast body of opinions on whether or not running is good cross training: Will this destroy my knee joints? Strengthen all the wrong muscles for ballet? What about the cardiovascular benefits, though? Of course, at this point I have no choice – I can run, or I can watch my beautiful college GPA go down in flames because I’m not fast enough on the track. I’ve tried walking the field test as well, which has given me little more for my trouble than more time spent in getting a bad grade and some ferocious shin splints.

​Over the years, the dance students at ORU have gotten to discover the best way to adapt to this enforced training, and learn more about movement and our bodies as we engage in non-dance physical education classes. We learn, often through trial and error, how much we ought to push ourselves in relation to our rehearsal load, when an upcoming performance is more important than one or two extra time points, and the wondrous miracle of ice packs. Personally, I’ve come to appreciate the extra gym time since it has, in a sense, forced me to take ownership of actually cross training – and the running has definitely increased my stamina. So until our program gains enough credibility to get some slack on the track when we really need it, I look on the bright side, sprinting across the gym like I’m headed for a quick change.

Picture
PC: Angelyn Maura
Jessica Collier is an undergraduate student at Oral Roberts University and a member of the ORU Dance Program. She has studied ballet and modern dance with Rachel Bruce Johnson, Amy McIntosh, Robbee Stafford, Christina Woodrow, Allison Pringle, and Roman Jasinski. Jessica is currently in her fifth year of study at ORU, pursuing degrees in Nursing and Dance Performance.
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    photo by Martin Perez, dancers: Amy Diane Morrow and Rachel Meador.
    Picture
    PC: Jeanne S. Mam-Luft

    Author

    It is a simple philosophy here at THE BELL HOUSE; make connections by bringing people together through dance. Art that seeks to defy a fractured view of the world by creating culture that cares for the soul and is concerned with human thriving.  For me, it isn’t enough to just make dance for dance’s sake; it is my belief that it is the connective power of people that makes art worth engaging.  We do that by taking our interests and talents and challenging the ways we connect them to something tangible in the human experience.  It is through these connections and tangibilities that we see the true power of art and dance manifest back to relationships with and through people.  In my view, what matters is people; the time and space of making work refract and overlap revealing and creating new possibilities for human connection. 

    ~ Rachel Bruce Johnson, Executive & Artistic Director

    Archives

    January 2019
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    June 2016
    April 2016
    September 2014
    July 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014

    Categories

    All
    Children
    Choreography
    Dance
    Dance Process
    Long-distance
    Motherhood

    RSS Feed

The Exchange Choreography Festival and Oklahoma Dance Film Festival programs are made possible with the assistance of the Oklahoma Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as, additional subsidized support from partners, such as, The Tulsa Ballet & Holland Hall. ​
Proudly powered by Weebly
  • Home
    • About THE BELL HOUSE
    • THE BOARD
    • Accolades & Reviews
  • Exchange Choreography Festival
    • CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS | EXCHANGE
    • 2019 CREATIVE TEAM
    • 2018 Festival Schedule >
      • Festival Location
  • NEWS
  • COMMUNITY
    • Oklahoma DanceFilm Festival
    • PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT >
      • Internships & Volunteer
  • Writings
    • BLOG
  • CONTACT & SUPPORT
    • Purchase Tickets
    • Donate
    • Gallery
  • Shop