Pre-class Discussions

I recently had an all day student, we'll call her Julie. I first met Julie in the morning, she was already bundled up her gear, trendy goggles on, and ready to go. When I was looking for her in the children's lesson room, she quickly identified herself as Julie, and I brought her over to join the rest of my class. While talking there, I asked her to share her name with the rest of the class, at which point she told me her name wasn't Julie. Getting that sorted out took a little time, but in the end was kind of funny to me. I quickly made the connection that she was slightly shy and made a mental note of what I'd have to do to get her skiing.

Once outside, she was skiing with a snow plow that turned constantly to the left. We began working on what we could do to fix this. We'd start at the top of the hill, she'd repeat exactly what she was going to do, and then proceed to not do any of it while skiing down. It was a little frustrating, but happens often enough. While talking to her, I noticed that she was calling things randomly different words making talking with her confusing. For example, she'd say a chairlift was an elevator. After a little while we stopped and broke for lunch.

After lunch my class grew 3x larger, and a second instructor was added. We split the group up based upon skill levels a little later on. The second instructor opted to take the kids who were still on the beginner section and Julie went with the second instructor. At the end of the day I caught up with the second instructor who was frustrated beyond belief at how he couldn't communicate with Julie. We talked a little bit and I had noticed many of the same issues earlier. I had attributed them to her being a little stubborn 5 year old. It wasn't until Julie's mom showed up for the report card review that everything made sense.

Julie wasn't a native english speaker.

She had no accent, no indicators for us in why we might need to say something slower or a little different. In fact, after talking with her mom, we discovered english wasn't her second language either. It was her third. Both the other instructor and I felt we could have done a much better job describing things if we had just known this one detail.

This highlights the most important detail for parents. If your child has some special needs, please let us know. Despite everything Corpy's children's program had setup, we're still not mind readers.