October 17, 2006

7:06p No lesson tonight
I got to my group lessons, Basic 7-8 (YAY were doing USFSA now!) and it was mostly the same girls, with 2 new ones- one who looked about 6- the rest are probably 9ish.

S., our instructor from last session comes over and tells us she is teaching our class because our instructor is at an open house. She then tells me that she is 3 instructors down tonight. She goes over to another coach, combines a class. Then she comes back, gets us started on a landing position glide and says she's not sure what she's going to do with the last class- a single, beginning adult. I told her- insurance won't like it, but if she really is a complete beginner, I could teach her tonight.

So that's what I ended up doing. The girl had never skated before, but was actually moving really well. She had her feet very leaned toward the inside edges, so we talked a little about being "flat". Then we practiced falling- and I told her to make sure to curl her hands into fists so fingers can't get cut over- something I remember from my very first lesson when I was like 8- but am not sure if that's "official" teaching. Then we did forward marching, concentrating on keeping our hands on our "table top" and bending our knees. Since she could already skate okay, we didn't march for long, just long enough to talk about "middle to back of the blade" for her weight distribution. Then we did a little forward stroking- trying to keep her off her toepicks, and pushing to the sides, introduced a snowplow stop. All of this and there were still 10 minutes left!! These lessons go so fast when you are taking them. So we did a lap around the rink, and I asked her if she wanted to practice this more or learn somethin new- which of course she did, so we did fwd swizzles, which she did pretty well, and then put them into a combo- 3 swizzles, 3 strokes, 2 footed glide to the blue line.

Hopefully she thought her lesson good. Afterwards Sue told me to let her know if I ran out of patch coupons, but of course I barely use the ice I'm given for lack of time. She was so grateful... it was kind of nice, but really no big deal (except maybe if something happened, and then I'm not a teacher... S. told me it was officially "her" lesson, so I guess that's the semantics that gets around that.)

I get to take a make up lesson Saturday morning.

I also really need to talk to someone about getting my boots punched out, but I'm so intimidated by Sergei and I think he might be the only one who knows anything about that... but I can only go 30 minutes in them before my toes hurt like crazy.