The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

Tonight while we were playing zoo one of my students informed me that some octopi actually have nine legs. This was the first I'd ever heard of that, but it's possible things have changed since I was in kindergarten. (It has been a while.)

I have new classes now, as of yesterday, and so far things are mostly good. I'm a little worried about the second class because the two girls are really not cool at all with putting their faces in the water. In fact one of them doesn't seem to know how to blow bubbles. That happens from time to time, where it's something that actually has to be taught, but I've rarely encountered it because for most kids it's instinctive. So this class might be a little challenging to teach because they're more "junior" than I'm used to, but I think if I reset my expectations I can make it ok. After all, the goal is just to get them generally accustomed to being in the water -- not to win the Olympics.

But my FIRST class! Excuse me while I kvell... Two of the girls I had last session and they've made SO MUCH progress! They both put their WHOLE FACES faces in the water now! One of them even puts her whole head in and is well on her way to self-buoyant prone floats. The other meanwhile has nearly gotten the hang of backfloating. And the third kid, who's new, is keeping up pretty well with the other two, which I gather is a big leap from where he was in his other class last session. Anyway, it's great. The challenge in teaching this class then will be to adjust my routine for their new talents.

I have one other class as well, similar to the one I taught last session. This time, though, it's three girls and one boy. We spent all day today working on the crawl stroke. I expect we'll do the same tomorrow, adding also the back crawl. Then we'll move onto learning new strokes. This level has way too many things to learn in 8 sessions than is feasable to teach, but I think I'll be better organized about it now than last session when I had to figure it out on the fly. The challenge, however, will be nomenclature: I have two students with the same name. It makes giving instructions tough... ("No! Not you! The OTHER one...")

But the kids are nice and fun to be with. It's also nice to be with people who are willing to do what you tell them! There aren't nearly enough environments where that happens...