Instructor Training course – Penultimate Day

  The first thing Dave told us this morning was that we had all passed the written test, although he didn’t give us our actual marks.  To be honest it wasn’t that difficult; 15 questions with a possible 39 marks and we needed 30 to pass.

  The next thing Dave told us was that four of us would be giving practice lessons today so we had to think on our feet because he didn’t say who would be going first.  As it turned out the first lesson was required after about half an hour and it was my task to improve the turn shape and steering of snow ploughers.

  I decided to keep it simple (for a change) and get everyone to ski behind me, keeping as exactly in my track as they could - so as long as my turns were good everybody else would be forced to make good turn shapes if they kept to my track.

  Then I stopped them to check that they were managing the task and to ask them what they thought contributed to a good turn shape.  Since they gave the right answers (steering by rotation) I asked them to ski down one-by-one keeping to a narrow corridor (to keep the steering continuous) but at that point Dave stopped me (as I thought he might !).

  The review seemed fairly positive so perhaps this was a better lesson as my previous couple of attempts rather flopped from being over-ambitious.

  Apart from one other practice lesson in the morning and a couple in the afternoon we practised solidly, mostly Central Theme stuff but for the last hour I got to practice my weaker points: carving and short turns.

  There was no lecture this evening so I stayed out for another hour to practice my carved turns - I’m getting there but I don’t think it’s good enough yet so I’m not at all confident about passing and tomorrow is results day.