Teaching little kids to ski is a great job

Teaching little kids to ski was the most rewarding job I have ever had. I already wrote a post for freewrite about it. That post summarizes how I got that cool job and the perks and great money that came with the job.

This post will give you some details of the skiing part of what I was doing.

Even though the kids might be there for 9 hours a day, and I was there for 10, the skiing part was 1.5 hours in the morning and then 1.5 to 2 hours in the afternnoon. It does not seem like a lot of time skiing, but for small children that have never done it before, and maybe even never seen snow before, it was quite enough time.

Just getting outerwear and ski boots on was an effort in many cases. Little feet do not want to go in the boots! Once I would get my kids suited up, out we went to the hill. Everyone had to carry their own skis as we walked out. At 4-12 years old, the kids had varying ski carrying abilities.

Oue classroom was in a corner of the resort, and our doorway opened up to a place right by the bottom of the lift. But at the start of the morning we were not going up to the hill yet anyway.

Instead we went to a small slope nearby. This had a carpet the kids could walk up in side step and then they would ski down the tiny rise. More advanced teachers would pluck off the talented ones,and soon I would be left with the losers.

We walked over to this place and everyone got their skis on, with a lot of help the first times. Chasing skis was part of my job as they would scoot 20 feet away often.

Then some kids could not even get up the carpet, or would fall at the top, or be too scared to ski down, or would fall as soon as hey got going. Until they got better, this is where we were staying. If we had 15 kids to start with, I might be left with 5 of them at the end of the first hour.

There was a rule that I was not allowed to pick up kids when they fell. Instead I fell next to them and showed them how to get up - repeatedly. Some weeks I would have to fall 100 times or more and get up over and over again to try to make them see how to do it.

During all of this time in the carpet area, I never had skis on. It was much easier to do my tasks in boots. Walking in those boots for hours a week was the best lower body workout ever. My season of ski teaching made me the most fit I ever was in my life until I finally lost my weight twenty years later.

So now I have two posts about teaching skiing to little kids, and we still are not skiing yet! Hopefully more prompts will come up for this topic and the story will be completed.

The photo for this post is not at the resort, but is a childhood memory of snow for me. One of my relatives took this shot of my uncle's farm in the 1950's, and I ended up with it on my hard drive. Now here in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia, I have no snow to show!

My post today is for @marblely's Thursday Favorites Contest where this week we were asked about our favorite jobs. I'm right at the end of the time now, so be sure to watch for next week's contest unless you can type fast!