I should have expected this: because the work week here runs Monday to Sunday, they’ve asked me to have tomorrow as my last day of work. It was very crowded on the lifts today but there were only about 40 kids in ski school! I was the only position on greens, and Bob, a part-timer offered to merge his yellow class with me too, but then enough kids showed up that he could get three and me four. One boy was in yellow and his sister was in green but she wanted to be with him and I traded Bob a kid to get them together. It wasn’t a problem because they all seemed universally crappy: in fact Bob’s yellows skied better than my greens. A lot of parents try to put their kids in blue when they’re really yellow; so it was with some of mine.
The kid I gave to Bob was six years old (Tameca knew him and didn’t move him back to Cats, I don’t know why) so I was glad to be rid of him ‘cause he was hard to communicate with. Dan brought me up another boy and took me aside to whisper that the kid was “a space cadet.” He wasn’t that spaced-out, I discovered: he was simply Mexican, named Emiliano, but with patience I could talk to him just fine in English and he turned out to be the strongest kid, enthusiastic and with good wedge turns.
The other boy I had was the slowest: he skied in a huge braking wedge and I worked with him to just get it smaller and ski faster. The two girls I got mostly had problems with keeping their wedge together, so they’d ski straight on out of control. I kept in good humor because I’d already decided that I’d spend the whole day on High Meadow and take as long as I needed to improve their skiing. I think it went all right and they all improved some, though we pretty much looped “The Playground” (the little series of rolling hills there) over and over. Whenever they went out of control I’d not let them do it and make them practice controlled wedge turns for one run instead.
The brother and sister were meant to be picked up early, but by the time their father caught up to us on High Meadow we only had two more runs to do anyway, which I did with the remaining two. I took them to Spongebob’s trail and they handled the quick turns there very well! I let that father go up on the chairlift with his two kids and he reported that they said very good things about me as an instructor and he really appreciated it. When I checked out the other girl at the end of the day, her father also spoke to her and then said that she was very happy with me as an instructor, but nobody gave me any tips! Oh well, at least I know I did a good job.
It was a hot day today. One of the little girls, Nicole, kept dropping her coat off her shoulders to her elbows and taking off her gloves. I told her she had to either have her coat on or off. After a run we went back inside to put the coats away, and I got my vest and wore the short-sleeved spring uniform.
I took these photos ages ago and then I got so frustrated with the photo hosting sites that I never got around to uploading them, but here:
This is me in the uniform vest with a long-sleeved shirt under it. Normally I wear a short sleeved shirt so my arms are bare down to the gloves.
Here I am in that spring uniform with a class that I had a few weeks ago. Actually these were taken at the very start of this month, so I apologize for taking so long!
The normal uniform coat for comparison. I get bad hat-hair from wearing my Canyons cap all day.
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