I've said it before and I'll say it again: the most important lessons we teach as ski and snowboard instructors are first-timer lessons. We have one chance to make someone's first experience on skis or on a snowboard a positive, engaging, fun experience and if we fail, if we have a bad day, we lose an opportunity to share our sports with more people. There is an internal industry corollary to the beginner's lesson, and it's how I spent one of my days last week.During both of my annual ski seasons – here in Vermont and in New Zealand in "summer" – I spend a lot of my time on the clock training instructors. In the nuanced little corner of the world that is ski and snowboard instruction, ongoing instructor training is an essential component. In many ways, staff training is our best quality control method: we use it to make sure that our instructors are technically proficient, that they understand our particular view of the role played by guest service and a guest-centered teaching method, and that they continue to evolve as skiers and riders as well as teachers. Those of us who instruct for a living crave instruction ourselves, and so our training also forms an important part of how we think and feel about our jobs in ways that are hard to quantify. It is in this sense that the best and most devoted students make the best teachers. I enjoy training instructors a great deal – being a "clinician" in our lexicon – and it's one of the things I do that really enables me to continue my own development as a thinker about ski technique, ski teaching, guest service, and how people learn, move and function generally. Sometimes, however, staff training can become something far more basic and far more rewarding.
Recently, I've provided some training for instructors at a neighboring resort here in Vermont and I've been fortunate enough to spend a good chunk of it working with young and relatively new ski instructors. Last week, in fact, I spent a day with a young woman who was working as a ski instructor for the very first time. We covered the basics of ski technique, how we think about it in terms of skills, how we articulate it to adult and child guests, and how we consider what to teach and when. As part of our training day, I arranged for the "newbie" and the other young instructors to receive their uniforms and do some routine paperwork, immediately followed by a couple of free runs to shake out the cobwebs from the ski school jackets and to end the day with some vital fun.
On our first lift ride in the new jackets, a gondola, we chatted about everyone's nerves about being a new ski teacher and about the anxieties associated with caring for children in a mountain environment. I then realized that our "newbie" was fidgeting quite a bit and seemed a bit uncomfortable in her new jacket. I wondered out loud if we had decided on the wrong size and then it dawned on me: this was her first-ever ski instructor uniform and it made her a bit self-conscious and a bit more keenly aware of the new path on which she had set herself. It made me warm all over to look her straight in the face, confirm that it was her first uniform, and officially welcome her to a profession from which so many people I admire and care for derive such lasting satisfaction and enjoyment. Simply awesome! After a couple of runs where I like to think she was standing a bit taller and skiing a bit more deliberately, we walked into the staff room where a number of more senior instructors were milling about at the end of another day as ski and snowboard pros. As we entered, a number of them oooed and ahhhed at the young staff in their smart new jackets and I announced to everyone in the room that our "newbie" was in an instructor uniform for the very first time. Everyone cheered, congratulated, slapped on the back, and genuinely extended their heartfelt welcome to our newbie – old grisly mountain men, young dudes and babes, snowboarders, skiers, retirees, Americans, Europeans, kids and adult staff, instructors and supervisors alike shared in the moment to help her realize how much they all appreciated her joining them. It was really very cool. Our newbie may have been slightly embarrassed and self-conscious at first, but I'm confident that she understood why we all thought it was so cool. It was a wonderful moment, and was one I suspect is repeated in locker rooms all across the alpine world every year.
While I was kidding slightly as I told our newbie that I wished her a successful life as an instructor, filled with poverty and happiness, I was only partly kidding. It's a hard life, teaching skiing - long days out in the elements, little money even under the best circumstances, and peers who fail to understand why we've decided to spend our time as "bums" and not respecting that we're really professionals devoted to a craft. In the faces of the staff present on that day last week and on newbie's was a shared understanding of the inherent good in what we do, the simple joy of it, and the immense (if not monetary) rewards that we receive from it. As long as we all carry a little slice of what it's like to experience the joys of teaching skiing and riding to someone for the first time, we're bound never to become jaded and to continue our progress as skiers and riders, and as teachers. I wouldn't trade it and I was thrilled to be a part of a new beginning on that path. As we head into 2010, it's a wonderful reminder of what's really important here in the mountains.
