Breaking the Teaching Cycle

Teaching snowboarding is a (surprisingly) well planned out event, with a series of drills that we take students through to get them from standing on a board to confidently turning down the bunny slope (Ed. note - when I say "well planned out event" I, of course, mean in theory. In practice, the day is an exercise in controlled chaos and any learning that happens is purely accidental). We're so organized, in fact, that we have a "teaching cycle" that helps dictate how to teach a lesson. I won't go into all the details here, but a part of the cycle consists of "plan a task, present information, and check for understanding." An example of this would be something like the instructor deciding that we want to work on heel-side traverses (plan the task), the instructor telling the students what the students are going to do (present the information), and finally the instructor checks to make sure the students know what they're supposed to be doing (check for understanding).

In the course of the day I go through this process, I dunno, a million times. And after working for a few days straight it's pretty much all you're doing: outline the task and check for understanding. Unfortunately it gets so ingrained that you can't just turn it off. The first night my parents arrived in town we headed up to the mountain to rent my dad's ski gear and to pick up ski tickets for the weekend. Waiting for the rental guys to get my dad's gear figured out I decided to see how my mom and sister were doing with the tickets. Without thinking I turned to my dad and said something like, "Okay dad. I'm going to head upstairs and see how mom is doing with the tickets. You're going to stay here and get the rest of your gear figured out. When my mom and I finish up we'll head back down here and meet you by the check out. Understand what we're doing?"

I had accidentally snuck into instructor mode and was essentially talking to my dad like he was a 10 year old student.