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| Some of the best pros I know, making "work" oodles of fun at Aspen, as usual. |
I speak French. I excel at dining in French and I can execute a world class Gallic shrug, and I do also speak French pretty well. My grammar has definitely faded over the decades as has my vocabulary, but once I am immersed in a French environment I comport myself admirably. Especially for an American.
I even teach skiing in French when I’m lucky, as I did
recently for several days with a super cool young graduate student. She is
totally fluent in English but was a nervous beginner who was quite homesick in
a way that left her really just wanting to learn skiing in French. We had a
blast, she absolutely slayed it on the hill, and the crepes in Snowmass worked to transport us just that little bit closer to her home and her people. I hope she enjoyed her time learning skiing in
this most foreign place as much as I enjoyed the experience of introducing her
to our sport in a language that is not my own.
It’s always interesting to me when friends and colleagues
ask me how I learned to speak French so well. I usually just explain that I
studied French through Junior High School and High School with a bit of course
work in college as well, and that I’ve worked with enough native French
speakers to practice a bit, but that’s a simplification. Often, well-meaning
people respond by bashfully describing their few years of French studies that
never really took hold, which I appreciate but which also can make me feel a
little sorry for them. I feel sorry for them not because it is somehow sad, but
because the reality of why I speak and understand French so well, and why I
love doing so, is that I had the tremendous good fortune to have two truly
exceptional French teachers in my public schools in Upstate New York, and I
understand how rare that is.
From seventh through twelfth grade, I went from novice fan
of Inspector Clouseau to AP French standout under the gaze of Madames Seiler and
Gropper. They were demanding, caring, always funny, often frustrated, and
remarkably talented teachers. My best friends were Michel, Xavier, Solange,
Lise and others, with our French names adopted for class as twelve-year-olds quickly
becoming everyday nicknames outside of French class, and that’s not an
accident. We loved it. My recollections are very non-specific – several decades
later, my ability to speak la belle
langue far outstrips any specific memories of how they taught us. Still, I
know precisely why I succeeded then and now, and it was those two remarkable
teachers who are responsible. I choose to not deconstruct what made them such
exceptional teachers (if that is even possible); I prefer instead to think of it as a
combination of superb technical skill, copious amounts of passion, and a
healthy dose of magic.
Obviously, sans doute,
there is a lesson for us here that has nothing to do with my laguage skills. The
lesson is about the impact of great teaching and, as it turns out, I teach and
train teachers for a living. Although love for the sport and technical
advancement are aligned in a meaningful and substantive way, the love for the
sport is vastly more important because without it, our raison d’etre as skiers, our reason for being skiers in the first
place, simply disappears. Keeping this front and center in our minds when we’re
working together to hone our craft as instructors and when we’re working with
students of every level and every age is vital. And it always brings to mind
the great instructors, coaches, and teachers under whose spell I’ve been so
fortunate to fall in my life.
‘Do you remember your ski instructors as a kid?’, I ask new
instructors. Did those instructors plant the seed in you for a love of skiing
for the rest of your life? Do you realize that this is now your job, your
charge, your burden, and your blessing? I wouldn’t trade it for anything, and
sharing that, speaking about it with others who choose to pursue our profession
is absolutely vital.
Every Halloween, Madame Seiler would wear an oddly long, 50’s
style skirt with a big, fake, plastic ice cream scoop stuck to it. Her
explanation was that for Halloween she was dressed as a “jupe à la
mode”, which in French means a fashionable skirt and in English means a skirt slathered
in ice cream. She loved it, and in my mind’s eye I still can see her big grin
and enormously long arms gesticulating wildly as she explained her costume to
the unwary.
For me, the open question is whether, several
decades from now, the grownups who ski with me as kids now will still giggle as
they borrow my line that ‘it’s … just … snot … funny. Nope, definitely snot
funny at all.’ It’s not quite the jupe à la mode, but it is my joke and, well, you never know; maybe
it will stick.
