83. How Skiing is like Teaching
In Episode 83, I share my two passions: teaching and skiing.
How is skiing like teaching?
Skiing, like teaching, is incredibly difficult. Even if you use a lift, skiing can make you so sore that you feel muscles you didn’t even know you had the next day.
Teaching challenges us to use all sorts of emotional and pedagogical muscles that you never knew we had. We may not even know we needed to flex those muscles until the situation arises, like in skiing, until we have to turn a certain way, until we need to react in just the right way to a student or a parent or a colleague.
Inevitably, in skiing, just like in teaching, there is falling.
When we make a mistake in our classrooms, when we lose our balance, when our lessons literally fall flat, some days our teaching mistakes feel not so big and we just fall into some gentle powder.
Other days, our mistakes feel so big and so bad, we hit the metaphorical hard snow and really fall so hard, it feels like we bounce.
It’s in those moments that it feels hard to get up. But we do. We may be bruised but we come back to work, get on the chairlift again, and point our skis downhill, into the challenge of our day to day at school.
Finally skiing can be slightly dangerous as we ask our legs and our bodies to literally flow into the gravity that takes us downhill. If we resist, if we clench up, if we tighten, we resist how the gravitational flow can help us.
But if we allow the flow of our teaching day to support us and trust it to help us down the mountain, we don’t need to effort as much, we don’t need to feel as if we have to control what is not in our control. We just submit.
ENJOY THIS EPISODE!
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More About Teacher Talk with Chrissy Nichols:
Teacher Talk is the podcast for educators like you who are on the brink of burnout, or are already there. It’s your guide to feeling better about being at school and being in your life. Your host, Chrissy Nichols, is a life coach for teachers. In her weekly episodes, she will give you quick tools, tips, and brain hacks to understand that there is absolutely nothing wrong with you. It’s time to find the joy in teaching again and get back to feeling like the best version of yourself.