Monday 10 January 2011

First weekend instructing.

So I've just had my first weekend of lessons and it went really well.
On Friday I shadowed Chappy, one of the other instructors on Norquay for the morning, then in the afternoon he was booked to teach a group from Canmore, but the Scottish couple we'd been working with asked if I could stay with them and so that's what I did and we had a good lesson together.

On Saturday I taught the first weekend in an 8 week program. I had a group of 9 level 2 kids, where level 1 is never skid before at all, so they could stop but not turn. We stuck to the bunny hill and had a good day's teaching; it seemed to me like they made a lot of progress. It was also handy that Yannick (another instructor) took 3 of them off separately, because there was a fairly significant divide in the group in terms of ability. So with just 6 the afternoon was a bit better, plus I had 3 less people to pick up off their feet when they fell down.

On Sunday I had a group of 4 level 4 5 year olds just for the morning. Two of them were enthusiastic and fun to teach but the other two were a little difficult to convince that skiing was a good idea. One cried as her mum left and so stayed with her for a while before joining us on the magic carpet, and I had to tell one little boy that it he came skiing and did really well then he would get into The Guiness Book of World Records for being the most awesomest skier ever, after he said that he wanted to be at home looking at the pictures in it. One of the girls in the group was also the daughter of Andre, the boss up at Norquay, so hopefully she'll tell him that I'm awesome and he'll give me loads of money!

At the end of the day, 11 of us got recruited to clear the lodge's upper balcony of snow, which turned out to be a pretty enormous task, and after 2 hours we'd only managed half of it with our pick-axes and shovels, despite being fueled by free beer, so that was loads of fun(!)

I also taught myself to snowboard on Friday at the Norquay night skiing which was a lot of fun, and then a whole bunch of us went tubing, where you go sliding down a track in a rubber ring, which is also a pretty good laugh. So I'm on the way to becoming ambidextrous on the slopes, although for now I'll be sticking to the green and easy blue runs.

Unfortunately January is looking pretty slow and at the moment I'm only getting work on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. I'm going to have to work on selling some lessons (somehow) in order to try and get some more hours in so that I can get some cash coming in.

We're planning to take a trip to kicking horse this Wednesday, or maybe Wednesday of next week, which should be cool because apparently they've got tonnes of snow at the moment.

After having a pretty chesty cough and spending 3 days on the slope shouting out to students I've lost my voice, so for now I'm just taking it easy trying to feel a bit less groggy.

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