Newton Was a Terrible Ski Instructor

Spring, last week, at Glendhu Bay in Wanaka, NZ

My seasons teaching skiing in New Zealand include an amazing amount of instructing mileage, most of it with beginner and intermediate skiers. Thankfully, it’s the best way I know to vet my ideas, shore up my understanding, and secure my belief in the fundamentals.

Each season, some theme seems to arise from the volume of work that I do which helps put skiing and teaching into perspective for me. That was certainly the case this past season, and that theme is still both cracking me up and informing my teaching. So, without further or due, Russ’s 2017 Big Picture Theme and Groundbreaking Thought About Skiing, drumroll please … wait for it …

Physics is only complicated when you explain it.

I’ve settled on the belief that once kids can run around, throw balls and catch them, annoy their sisters, and figure out that the stove is hot to the touch, their understanding of physics is perfect and all we can do as adults is mess that up. I’ll prove it to you with a few basic examples I’ve been using with guests – adults and kids. You’ll have to use your imagination (you were a kid once so you should have some imagination in there somewhere).

Example 1. First, a non-skiing example to keep it simple. Imagine a kid who’s learned to ride a bike with training wheels and who is heading out for their inaugural voyage without them. First, they adjust their balance going in a straight line. Then, once they're feeling good, they go around the corner. Now, imagine a kid going around the corner on a bike for the first time and tipping the bike the wrong way, to the outside of the corner instead of towards the inside. Huh? Exactly; it’ll never happen. They instinctively know how and in what direction to tip the bike. Now imagine what would happen if you tried to explain to them about tipping the bike going around the corner before they tried it for the first time. This is when you start to sound like the adults in a Peanuts cartoon (blah, blah, blah) and the only other sound you’ll hear if you’re paying attention is the sound of the fun getting sucked out of bike riding.

Example 2. Imagine that all five of us are in the back seat of my dad’s car on the way to soccer practice. Now, we all know that my father drives too fast, and today he takes a left turn way too fast. You, sitting on the far right side of the car seat as you are, get smooshed by the rest of us against the right side, don’t you?! Now, to stop you from getting smooshed will it work if we let our weight go to our right foot, stay strong on that leg and foot as the car goes around the corner? The answer is “duh”, of course it works. This is a good time to practice your quizzical kid, ‘adults are weird’ look – it’s very valuable.

Example 3. A common thing that ski instructors do when skiing with kids across very flat ground is the game of world-wide fame called “pole basket slingshot”. It’s simple: while sliding along your most despised cat track have a kid behind and slightly offset to one side of you grab hold of the basket of your ski pole that you’ve extended back towards her while you keep your hand on the grip, right pole if she’s on the right side, left if on the left (without poking her with it – safety first). Once she’s got a firm grasp, pull the pole quickly forward so she rockets forward. As long as kids understand the goal (e.g. going fast) they’ll know precisely when to let go of the pole so that they slingshot past you. Mix it up, change speeds, sides, facial expressions and you’ll all have a blast as long as you make appropriate sound effects. Explain the physics of the slingshot to them and they’ll suddenly miss their parents and will dread skiing with you forever.

I love talking to adults about skiing in this way, using these examples about our natural understanding of physics. I particularly love it when there’s a kid available to prove the point. Telling parents that their 6-year-old child has a perfect understanding of physics and then proving it never ceases to entertain me, although I usually have to redeem myself with one of my celebrated uncle jokes (“Hey, kid, snot funny. It’s, just, snot, funny.”).

Remember when Bill Clinton addressed the Democratic National Convention as keynote speaker when Dukakis was nominated? He droned on forever and then got resounding applause when he said “In conclusion”. We’re at that point here, which is to say that I’m getting to the point.

Isaac Newton was a great physicist and one of history’s greatest minds but he’d have made a lousy ski instructor. Newton wasn’t the first person to notice that apples fell from the tree to the ground. His contribution was in providing the correct explanation of why and how in a way that allows science to analyze, predict, and precisely calculate the effects of gravity. Without Newton, we’d never have flown in airplanes, launched satellites, or been to the moon. Still, without Newton apples would still fall, our kids would still tip their bikes the correct way going around corners, and skiing would still be awesome with awesome sauce on it.

My second theme from the season is apt here: clarity is more important than detail. Yes, that means clarity in explanation, but more importantly it means clarity in our students’ understanding. When we’re careful about digging further into the details and judicious about letting the curiosity of our students govern how deep we go, we’re more likely to keep things fun and make our teaching more effective for our guests. So, ski teachers, don’t mess with anyone’s clear understanding of something by explaining it. And this also goes for chefs, because I don’t want to know how much butter you’ve used when I’m eating birthday cake.

Our ski season here in Vermont begins in a few short weeks, and I’m looking forward to feeling gravity and lots of other principles of physics without having to explain them too much. Did someone say cake?