I teach swimming lessons in the most beautiful location. It's up in the hills behind the Berkeley campus, with sweeping views of the glistening Bay, shimmering San Francisco, and the ocean beyond the Golden Gate. Every time I catch the view as I walk home it takes my breath away, even though I've seen it so many times all the other years when I lived and worked up there.
Unfortunately, gorgeous though Strawberry Canyon is, it's a place where there is no summer. Thus swimming lessons often become a somewhat painful ordeal.
(Even under the best of circumstances, Berkeley is never as hot as the inland valleys. And lately everything's been less hot than normal. But some days, like today, when the fog stubbornly refuses to burn off it's not even sunny enough to compensate.)
Even though teaching is physically arduous, somehow I end up feeling invigorated from it. Maybe it's the exercise and fresh air, and maybe it's because I have a job where I get paid to play. I have three classes: two with little kids (3-5 years old) and one where the kids probably range from 6-10. The last one has four boys and one girl. They can be a handful, but they're also kind of (inadvertantly) funny. Yesterday I insisted they swim for a bit without their goggles (actually, I would prefer they not use goggles at all during swim lessons, but I decided against having that battle). They all whined about how they could only swim with goggles. I said, "You're going to need to learn to swim without them. What if one day you fell off a boat?" That quieted them down and they did the drill without them. Unfortunately, three of the boys have identical goggles and it was a bit of a comedy of errors as they tried to figure out whose was whose when they put them back on.
With the little kids the dynamic is different. All I really want is for them to acclimate to locomotion in water. Once they are ready-to-learn they can focus on form and strokes. But that doesn't usually happen until after kindergarten, when they've now gotten the hang of "in class we learn things." Also, they need their bodies to start becoming more linear. Cherubic little kids can't really do a proper crawl stroke, no matter how much they try. To do it you need for your hands to be able to touch up above your head. However, chubby little arms often don't.
But if I can get them to put their heads in the water regularly and comfortably, and if I can get them to float on their own on their fronts and backs, it's a great bonus. Towards that end, every day I hold nearly the same lesson. We begin by entering our "bathtub" and washing off our knees, elbows, belly buttons, chins, noses, shoulders, foreheads, etc. Then we say "hello" to the fish, blowing lots of bubbles and then putting our ears to the water to hear them say "hello" back. Then we do rocketship rides - with pointy arms and legs in prone position - and backfloat rides. Then depending on the time we sometimes play ring-around-the-rosy, often with surprise endings ("We all fall UP!") and my favorite game, zoo. Zoo was a game I started using years ago when one of my kids wasn't paying attention, and instead was wandering off and imagining on his own he was various animals. I decided to have the rest of the class join him, and now "zoo" is a regular staple of my classes, where we pretend to be different animals as we walk back and forth across the pool steps.
Today was a little different, though. It was safety day, and as part of it we practiced wearing lifejackets. Unfortunately, it was foggy and cold, so no kids (nor teachers) were really having a good time. One of my students was already having a bad day, having been near tears when she arrived. She didn't enjoy the lifejacket practice at all, and at the end of it, with half the class left, she started crying and got out of the pool. But she stayed close by as her mom dried her off and encouraged her to watch the rest of the class. I did the rocketship rides and backfloats with the other kids, and then it was time to get out.
"Time to say good-bye to the fish," I announced, as I always do to signal the end of class. All of a sudden she's there on the steps in the pool, bending over to blow her bubbles.
"I forgot to say good-bye to the fish," she said between sniffles. So she did.