Once again, ENS is Exercise and Nutritional Science, basically a PE and health class.
For the most part, ENS 2 has largely the same structure of ENS 1. Like before, it was split into a health and PE sector. Like before, we had 1 day of swim and 2 days of health a week. The main difference between this tri and the previous one is that we largely played a different set of sports. The sports for this trimester were badminton and volley tennis (Volley tennis was actually from last tri) as well as water polo (Which took up a notable chunk of swim days). Let’s start with swim, since that’s my strongest suit.
The second ENS class divides swim into two smaller fields: regular swim and water polo. The Lane 1 and Regular Swimmer division still exists, and Lane 1 swimmers don’t have to participate in the water polo activities since the water polo activities take place in the deep end of the pool, which has a depth of 13 or 14 feet. Regular swim, just like ENS, still exists and is a huge part of our grade and agenda. The swim has increased in intensity and is more demanding than previously.
At first, I didn’t think that’s how it would go. The first few swim sessions were easy… when you read my upcoming swim team articles, you’ll see a laughable comparison between the two in terms of difficulty.
For the most part, we never swam more than a few hundred yards in swim. We only swam for a half hour or so (A lot of the time it’s even quicker) and pretty much all the exercises were either kickboard or freestyle. The only time we’d do anything different is during a swim test, where we would actually swim quite a bit more (I think the most I ever swam on one ENS swim day is about 700 or so).
The swim tests had the same structure as that of ENS 1. You could go back to that to reread and it’d be basically the same thing, but in case you don’t have time, here’s a quick summary: There were two types of swim assessments, neither of them would lose you any points if you finished. The first was the 6 minute swim (Actually, this trimester, it was moved to an 8 minute swim) and would just be you continuously swimming for 8 minutes. Then, you’d count up the number of laps you did and that would be your score. The second type was the snake swim in which you’d swim a 25 on one lane before moving on to the next one and doing another 25, so on and so forth until you eventually covered the entire pool.
The water polo mostly just consisted of drills about how to throw and catch a ball. I think we only played one real game the entire trimester, and there wasn’t much going on there since few people really cared.
So honestly, let’s just go on to our other sports, which were badminton and volley tennis. Badminton, for the most part, consisted of “King of the Court” styled tournaments in which we would all team up into duos and fight each other somewhat chaotically. I ended up teaming with this guy named NT most of the time, and together the two of us would dominate… at losing. We didn’t win very many games despite putting up some resistance. I still wonder why my parents recommended for me to tryout for badminton.
Volley Tennis went more or less the same. Most of the time they had the same “King of the Court” structure as badminton, and I didn’t do much better at those. Teams in these games usually larger. Most of the time they went to four, but there were times when they were as high as five or even six.
The remainder of the class surrounded health. This tri, the class was about all the fun stuff: smoking, vaping, and sex. They started with smoking and the highlights of addiction and ways that people beat it. A lot of these consisted of slides and note-taking but also ted-talks which discussed certain methods to beating drug addiction.
Then they got to sex. They started with the emotional side of sex before talking about trafficking. They talked about this pretty much the same way with smoking— using videos and all that— and they played a few documentaries about peoples’ own experiences with that field.
In short, ENS 2 pretty much ENS 1 but with water polo and all the dirty minded topics.