The Big Teaching Day: On the Snowboard

After a morning in which I helped 200 students get through their first day on skis, I quickly ate some lunch and took a snowboarding lesson.

When I got to the staging area, I saw a young girl and two women. The girl, no surprise. One of women was going to be in the class as well. That was a surprise.

The three knew each other. One of the women was not taking in the class. Instead, she had a video camera and shot some footage of the rest of us. I jokingly told her that we would charge spectators double.

We started out by learning how to fall. There were some jokes all around on that subject, but there was actually less falling in the lesson than you would think.

The girl had some experience in riding, but the older student had none. It’s hard to work with students of such differing abilities, but I tried to alternate the points. The more advanced student does one thing, the other student does something else, and so forth.

I’ve got to move on to other tasks for the day, so I won’t go into much detail on the lesson. But it went very well. We got the novice student sliding down from the top of the bunny hill. (Fortunately it was walkable. Her fairly nice gloves would have been chewed up by the rope tow.) She was able to traverse from one side of the hill on the toe edge. Like many people, she found it easier to slide on the toeside edge rather than the heelside. By the time I thought we should try the heelside, the lesson was already running late, and she was probably too tired to attempt a more advanced maneuver. She thought of stopping. That’s learning the smart way. Learning to ride involves taking on something more advanced than what you are comfortable with–but never biting off too much.

I was very pleased at the end of the lesson. First, because she had made substantial progress, progress that I could see at various points throughout the lesson. Two, because she said “Now I can cross something off my list of life goals.” That may have been a joke (or not), but I know how satisfying it was to determine to learn how to snowboard, and then figure out how to do it. My student needs to learn more, of course, but she is on her way. The third reason for my pleasure is that she gave me a nice tip when it was all over. Few instructors are in the business to get rich (and even fewer succeed). Still a little cold, hard cash is a significant sign of appreciation.

For three years, I took ski lessons each time I went to Colorado. Each time, I had the same instructor at least one of the days. In the third year, I finally tipped him. Now I wish I had done it earlier.