I am thinking to myself right, are
people really going to want to read this? Hmm...We will find out. So brace yourselves,
this blogging world is all brand new to me and the start may be a little rough.
This blog is just like anything though, until you jump in how else are you
going to find out if you are good or not? That same thought crosses many peoples mind
when they first come learn how to ski. Now you are wondering how I came to this
point in the conversation. Well that is what this blog is all about, the
translation between my college life here in the grand state of Texas and my
life back home that revolved all around skiing, snow and the children I taught how to ski. This is truly where ski meets Greek.
Who knew
that the few of my crafting skills I do have come from sitting around midget
size tables consoling melodramatic children for hours on the weekends. I colored endless suns, rainbows and a
variety of animals on butcher paper for 4 years along with battling 5 year olds
on the perils of glitter and glue. Deer
Valley Ski School ended up being the best preparation for my upcoming week of
big/little crafting for Chi Omega.
Working at ski school though prepared me for than just mediocre crafting
skills, it equipped with some of best costumer services skills in the industry,
taught me how to deal with high stress situations and some intense ski tuning
skills.
One of the
first and most important things I learned form ski school was understanding
geography and culture, that seems obvious but if you talk the current 5 year
olds of the world you will find that they have a serious lack geographic
understanding. The most common response
I receive when I ask kids where they are from is this: “The United States”,
thank you small one, how insightful! It is awfully cute how innocent and naïve
there are in their answer but it makes me wonder about the education system,
sometimes you get their home address “1234 American Saddler Drive, Park City,
UT” which brings a lot more to the table for discussion.
I also
learned how to turn a very complicated topic into a very simplistic one, my
ability for accommodating different needs is quite strong. You cannot describe how to do a basic turn
like this to a 6 year old: “A wedge Christy, putting pressure on your downhill
ski and slowly progress onto the other ski”- I barley understand what that
means. Why would they? It needs to sound a lot more like this: “Make a pizza
pie with your ski and point your toes toward me and remember stand up tall”.
Within that description though you have to adjust for every child’s individual
need, this sounds ridiculous in way, why would I put so much thought into one child’s
lesson? Well these parents do not spend $1,000 a day to come off the mountain
with the same little skier they dropped off and on a personal level I don’t
want to give them anything less, skiing is an amazing sport and I want all
those little snow monsters to love it as much as I do.
I may no longer be a mere five minutes away
from the best powder in North America but that does not mean the knowledge I
gained from days spent on the mountain for my enjoyment or trying to provide
the joy to others did not follow me all the way to the hot and flat state of
Texas. Not only that but it does not
mean my newfound love for Texas and what I have here is not following me back
to Utah, I am living in the best of both worlds currently. Taking my experiences back and forth to each
place I spend my time in has really broaden my perspective on things and I
cannot wait for two and a half more years of this. Through the next semester y’all will somehow
find out how I can continue to connect skiing to SMU. I have met students who have yet to see the
snow yet in their lives, I find that nearly impossible but maybe this blog is
the answer. I guess I am looking at
Texas from 8,000 Feet.
No comments:
Post a Comment