Swapping children

Eight children passed through my hands today, and there was a time when I skied with only four of them. The kids kept streaming in, and I kept bumping them to different classes, so that at lunchtime I had a lot of paperwork to update my hill sheet with all the changes.

I was up first on Greens because Hal, who was meant to have that spot, got moved somewhere; perhaps he had a private. I had hoped to have a request private with one of my girls from yesterday, but that did not happen. Jeronimo was placed second on greens because he had one returner too... but Jonathan asked him to switch to red because there was a red kid who could only speak Spanish, and I ended up with his return: a ten-year-old girl named Olivia. I gathered up five children including my girl Sabrina from yesterday, and got moving... We had just about reached the chairlift when one of them named Eitan said he needed to go to the bathroom, and a young boy named Noah agreed, so we left our skis there and all walked back. I made them all go so that wouldn’t happen again. I could guess that a couple of the kids might be a bit more problematic... There was a fairly big gap in ability levels. Sabrina’s mother had told me she cried in the morning that she was still in a Green class, because she’d been blue in Cats. I think I handled that all right, promising she could go up to blue as soon as she tried getting her skis parallel.

When we returned to the chairlift I was given a sixth girl, named Riki. I checked her in on the chairlift and when we finally got up to High Meadow, we went with my buddy Matthew who was on Yellows with only two kids. Being on the chairlift so early implied he had a pretty strong yellow class, so I asked him to take my weakest students. I gave him Eitan, a boy with an Israeli father. I spoke to the father briefly while in line and he asked me to try teaching in Hebrew. That would have been fun, but the boy was slower and more nervous than the others and I thought he’d do better in the slower class. Matthew wanted to move the stronger of his two kids up to me but then that kid careened all over the place unable to stop, so he decided to hold on to him. There were a few occasions today when kids shot straight down High Meadow following the pure power of gravity without making any visible attempt to slow down.

Once I got back to the shuttle stop they gave me another girl to bring me back up to six, named Camryn. Her parents thought she should be a blue, but they were incorrect. On her first ride up, Camryn started crying and saying she wanted to go home. I asked some diagnostic questions, and decided she had altitude sickness, which Iain concluded as well. I had her ski down that first run, drink a lot of water, and rest inside until she felt better.

On that run up I went with Iain and his small blue class, and also held Matthew again with his yellow class, so I could shed some weight from the extremes of my ability levels. I saw that Sabrina would be slowed down by the others so I traded her to Iain for his weakest girl, another seven-year-old named Jacquelyn. I wanted less than six so I also gave Matthew a boy named Connor who was meant to be yellow. He was with Eitan in the red class yesterday and someone just considered him a strong yellow so they gave him to me in the morning. I improved his stance quickly but still thought he was my weakest remaining. It’s good that I am friends with the other instructors, because then I can tell my kids things like, “You’ll have fun with Matthew; he’s the funniest guy.” or, “Iain’s a good teacher, his group will go faster than ours.” Jacquelyn was decent but not so fast as to get bored, and soon I got teamwork into her head so she was considerate of others. I warned Iain that Sabrina liked the wedge, but at the end of the day he said she was very sweet and no trouble, and that she was a very smart seven-year-old.

So after sorting down to my five, I thought I actually had a pretty close ability level: none of them were any good. I made everyone stop to drink water and I put Camryn into the care of Augusto to rest until lunchtime. The four that remained were two brave seven-year-olds and two timid slightly older girls. I drilled them in the wedge stance and pressure control and tried to remind them to turn to stop, rather than “braking wedge”, so there was improvement there. Then I had to push them to try new things on High Meadow: the older little girls crashed in “Spongebob’s Forest” and became frightened of it. We tried some big rollers, like artificial hills, which were groomed by the beginner terrain park. The girls were only afraid of that once and from then on begged to do it often because I let them ski straight down there, enjoying the dips and rises in the ground. Some of them got a bit of air off the tops.

The mother of one of the girls, Riki, kept popping up to ask how we were doing. Riki had confidence issues, she said, and her goal was to get her brave enough to ski together with her. Riki could do anything after I’d proven to her that she could, so it was only a matter of being assertive enough to make her try it once. At the end of the day she eagerly jumped down the steepest bit of High Meadow. Her mother also joined us at lunch, because they keep kosher. She went up to buy her a pretzel. It was pretty funny when we scrambled to find food she could eat: Alicia said she sure had the right instructor on that job. I really worked hard for the tips on this kid. I gave her my useless glove liners (which are falling apart now) because her mittens were too warm, and at lunch her mother traded her own gloves for those.

At lunch I also retrieved Camryn. She didn’t want to eat anything and still wanted to go home, but I insisted she drink more water and put some French fries in front of her and she eventually ate them. I wheedled her into trying one run with me to see if she would have fun. Olivia talked to her too and wanted to ride up the chairlift with her, and I realized she could probably be more convincing than me so I let them go up together on the first chair, and that worked out great. Her mood improved quickly, though Olivia infected her with fear of Spongebob’s Forest before she even saw it. We went down there right away and both of them crashed, but they still seemed happy. They mocked Noah, who was supposed to be in back to help whoever fell but just skied by them. When I had to climb up that run to rescue them, the other three kids decided to climb up with me on Jacquelyn’s suggestion.

The five kids I had in the afternoon were very noisy. They kept shouting to each other and me about all the runs we did and laughing, so much that even Chris (the Cats supervisor) said I had the loudest group. I said they were exuberant. When they shouted between the two chairlifts my ears hurt but they were happy and the time flew by. I gave them all candy on the chairlifts or after the last run.

At the end of the day I had a frantic scramble to return all the kids to their parents, tell them all how their kids had done, and also collect all the new security tags we use now. It’s a little yellow tag with a phone number that says “I am a lost student” and clips to their jackets - just one more pointless thing to remember at check-out. Since we just started using them, most instructors didn’t get all of them, but I did because all the parents reminded me to. I didn’t fill out a single report card though. Riki was a hassle: she waited for her mother near the chairlift line and refused to follow me back to the beginner area until I climbed back up, physically grabbed and pulled her. When her mom did show up and I had my eyes on the last kid Noah, she disappeared and I found them inside the rough. I had to leave Noah on the magic carpet to finish checking Riki out and speaking to her mother. She gave me a tip, but asked for change! She asked me if I had a $10, which I did, and gave me a $20. So karma promptly balanced out the $10 tip I gave to the cashier yesterday. Riki’s mother would like to find someone to give a private lesson without paying the high fees for them at the ski school, so she wanted one “under the table.” I didn’t know anyone to recommend who has a day off tomorrow, so I said I’d be willing to do it on my day off.

Noah did a lap or few on the magic carpet while waiting for his mother, who didn’t recognize him because I had let him take off his bright orange jacket early on in the morning. They found each other around 3:30 PM.

This evening I spent a lot of time waiting at bus stops: I kept just missing the buses. I went grocery shopping for a handful of items I’d forgotten, and I proudly paid $29.41 in exact change, but then I just got to the bus stop to see three buses going away. So, I ate sandwiches at the bus stop and waited for another half an hour. Honestly I think the buses are so used to being late that now they tend to arrive a minute or two early and not wait.