Jupe à la Mode

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.