Ski School: Back to the basics
The problem isn’t only the instructor’s, or the ski school director’s for that matter. It concerns the area’s entire management team and its judgment of just what a ski school should be.
John Fry, SKI Magazine editor-in-chief, discussed this problem in a recent talk before the Rocky Mountain Ski Instructors Association. “For many instructors,” he said, “the subject matter of ski teaching and theory can become a kind of substitute for a post-graduate degree. What else would explain the hours and days which have been devoted to bio-mechanics or to rotary and counter-rotational forces in the turn?
“The teaching process itself has been grossly ignored because of fascination with abstract methods and final forms rather than the learning processes to arrive at these forms.”
We need to know far more, for instance, about optimum learning periods, physical conditioning, optimum class sizes, private vs. class instruction, learning reinforcement through practice and the effects of skier anxieties.
This last area is especially important, and it deserves frequent attention. The new skier, for all the skiing knowhow he’s been able to soak up from reading, movies and conversations with his friends, finds himself, when plopped on a ski slope, in the midst of an alien environment. He’s unfamiliar with the language of the sport, the equipment, the learning regimen, not to mention the weather. The last thing he needs is an instructor who comes on like the gelande specialist with the Erroll Flynn demonstration team.
The new skier isn’t out there to trade theory. He’s there to learn to ski and, he hopes, to have some fun doing it. Simply, he’s looking for understanding. And this understanding has to be developed, and demonstrated repeatedly, throughout all levels of the management mix if he’s to return again.
The ski instructor, in most cases, is the first and only ski area representative to make full personal contact with the customer. If that contact is to be fruitful, it should concern itself with more than teaching manuevers on skis. Yet the teaching of skiing is often all we ask of the ski school. It is a limiting situation both for the ski school and area management.
