I failed both my teach and ski days.
On the teach, I made several mistakes. The first was tying my teach almost exclusively to what I heard my students were working on in their skiing. It was a challenging to link all three of their foci into a single teach, but I came up with a plan. The second was incorporating into my teach a concept that I knew would be controversial in PSIA -- divorcing the upper body from the arc before the skis. And the third thing was some poor terrain management decisions. Looking for terrain suitable for medium radius turns, I wound up consuming almost all of the vertical before being done, so had to take a lift ride and wound up with a short teach. I know I can do better, and am retaking the teach day on April 27th.
On the ski day, I knew there are things that I had not prepared going into the exam. We were so busy the three weeks before the exam that I had very little time to work on the items that I had planned to work on, like the basic and highlighted maneuvers. In addition, the work on canting that had enabled some big strides in creating angulation and the ability to tip the outside ski left me refining groomed skiing rather than skiing terrain. So, these factors showed up in the exam. And it's clear I have a bunch more work to do to get there. Most of my scores were close to passing, but the whole picture is one that shows I've got more work to do. Certainly the conditions didn't help: it was exceedingly firm for most of the day, although the variable terrain in Sun Up bowl was super excellent corn/slush -- the highlight of the day! The lowlight was skiing the ice bumps with frozen slush chunks in Look Ma -- survival skiing for me.
The Level 3 exam is hard. No one in my group of 5 passed.
Anyway, I'm taking the MA exam on the 26th and (as noted above) retaking the teach day on the 27th. It seems to me that I'll be well served by letting a retake of the ski exam until next year.
Mike
On the teach, I made several mistakes. The first was tying my teach almost exclusively to what I heard my students were working on in their skiing. It was a challenging to link all three of their foci into a single teach, but I came up with a plan. The second was incorporating into my teach a concept that I knew would be controversial in PSIA -- divorcing the upper body from the arc before the skis. And the third thing was some poor terrain management decisions. Looking for terrain suitable for medium radius turns, I wound up consuming almost all of the vertical before being done, so had to take a lift ride and wound up with a short teach. I know I can do better, and am retaking the teach day on April 27th.
On the ski day, I knew there are things that I had not prepared going into the exam. We were so busy the three weeks before the exam that I had very little time to work on the items that I had planned to work on, like the basic and highlighted maneuvers. In addition, the work on canting that had enabled some big strides in creating angulation and the ability to tip the outside ski left me refining groomed skiing rather than skiing terrain. So, these factors showed up in the exam. And it's clear I have a bunch more work to do to get there. Most of my scores were close to passing, but the whole picture is one that shows I've got more work to do. Certainly the conditions didn't help: it was exceedingly firm for most of the day, although the variable terrain in Sun Up bowl was super excellent corn/slush -- the highlight of the day! The lowlight was skiing the ice bumps with frozen slush chunks in Look Ma -- survival skiing for me.
The Level 3 exam is hard. No one in my group of 5 passed.
Anyway, I'm taking the MA exam on the 26th and (as noted above) retaking the teach day on the 27th. It seems to me that I'll be well served by letting a retake of the ski exam until next year.
Mike
