Teach Your Teacher Well

It’s best to be honest with your doctor, your lawyer, and … your snowboard instructor. Neither overestimating nor underestimating your abilities serves you well.

Today I was part of a group lesson–three instructors and 11 students. The students ranged a lot in ability. One or two may have never made it off the little teaching bump. I ended up working with one fellow who, by the end of the lesson, was cruising down a green run, linking turns.

Looking back, I wonder if we spent too much time on the basics, repeating certain drills.

Sometime after we were into the lesson for a while I found out that he had a skateboarder–for two years. It made me wish I had been more vigorous in asking about his sporting experience. Perhaps I didn’t ask him directly, or perhaps he had answered my question, posed to several students at the beginning of the class, and I just didn’t hear it in the hubbub.

Still, it was in fact his first trip down some green runs, so it’s not as if the time in the lesson was wasted for him. Far from it. It’s just possible, though, that he would have gone even farther had there been better teacher-student communication.