Class Moments

I've been a little slack on posting recently due to the influx of work. The holiday season has apparently begun for some schools as the crowds have now gotten a lot larger. Two classes stand out in recent memory on the same day.

First is a mother who had skied "years ago", "is not an aggressive" skier, and has "put on several pounds since I last was active" (these are her own descriptions). We started with a run on the rope-tow/bunny slope to see how out of practice she was. Turns out, not too out of practice at all. I quickly took her up the chair lift and worked with her balance issues the entire way down. Making a few little fixes to her stance and movement settled her balance out, shot her confidence way up, and just made the class a lot of fun. After two hours she had gone from barely snow plowing to executing some beautiful advanced wedge christies. And she was able to do the same runs her daughter was doing. The two stopped by later in the day to thank me again.

Second is a snowboard class, I was pulled in to help. A "never-ever" group class with 8 students, all boys in the range of 10-14, most of them friends with each other.
Turns out 7 of the boys had some pretty serious riding experience, one of them was the "never-ever". Another instructor took the 7 guys for some good riding time while I worked on the first timer. Five minutes later it turned ugly and all my efforts were converted from snowboarding lesson to babysitting.

It's amazing how quickly this job can swing between a high and low point for a day. I did get the cheerful instructor award for the day from the lifties though. Apparently they're very confused why I can always be happy to be outside.