Current mood:	exhausted
Entry tags:	meetup

"Learning" to kayak
So, its been forever and a day since I last posted anything. I actually started to type up several posts in the last couple of weeks, but I have just been too busy at work to get them done and they just became out dated and pointless over time. But this is something I just really feel like writing about….

Last night Tanja and I went to another meetup. This one is for an "adventures" group which is planning activities such rock climbing, kayaking, skydiving, etc. Last night's meetup was a beginners kayaking class at the UT Med Pool. Sounds interesting right?

Well is totally sucked ass! This guy instructing the class didn't even proscribe to the "sink or swim" method of learning new skills he was of the "force you to sink then try to swim why keeping your legs immobile in the kayak" method. Let's just put it this way, Tanja ended up having to sit out of most of the class because of the way he was acting and his lack of any compassion and I only kept going because I am stubborn even when I wasn't learning a damn thing.

I'm jumping the gun. Lets start from the beginning. First off, the meetup wasn't very well planned. Originally it was supposed to be last Wednesday, but too many people said they wanted to go. So, the organizer broke it up into two groups and Tanja and I volunteered to wait until this week to do it. Also in the class this week was the meetup organizer and another member (I think her name was Linda). There was no contact information and the only description of the location was "near the corner of Madison Ave. and Mannasis".

So, Tanja and I drove there and after driving around there for a few minutes not seeing anything that said "UT Med Pool" or anything like it, we finally asked somebody and they showed us where it was. When we got there, Linda and Jeff (the organizer for this event) were already there. The instructor was picking out a kayak for Linda to use and then adjusting it for her.

They weren't very organized and so it took a while to get things straightened out and get out kayaks for all of us and then pick out skirts (a rubberized skirt that you put around your waste and then attach to the kayaks opening to keep water from getting inside). Then the instructor took several minutes to adjust Lindas kayak for her height, a minute or so to tell Tanja how to sit in her kayak with no adjusting (which later caused problems because it was too loose for her), and no time on show me anything.

With that the instructions started…with no demonstration and only a little bit of description he got right into flipping my kayak over and having me pull myself out of it. It wasn't that complicated, but a demonstration or a simple reminder not to come straight up might have prevented the bruise on my head as I came up and immediately hit my head on the kayak. It also didn't help that he took obvious pleasure in telling everybody that I "panicked". I shrugged it off, but that is beside the point. It's just bad form to insult your students when they are completely new to it.

Linda was next up and she learned from my example and didn't come straight up (see a damn demonstration does help). Then came Tanja…now Tanja has had a bad experience with canoeing in the past and expressed trepidation about if we were rolling the kayaks in this class. I serious would have thought they would give us some instruction on maintaining balance in the kayak and paddling around since we were all beginners. But no, they had us jumping right into flipping us over, who would have guessed?

Well, I was worried about Tanja because of this and I tried making sure she was ok with doing it, but she seemed determined to try it even if she was nervous about it. Anyway, the instructor flipped her over and she came out quickly and easily, but the instructor still said that she "panicked" for some reason. For which she really took offense and I could tell that she was getting upset by the way she got quiet and wasn't talking at all anymore.

After that we weren't given the chance to practice getting out of the kayak at all like you would normally think you'd do after learning something new, but oh well. Once again I got to be the guinea pig when we jumped right into learning to roll out of the water if we flip. He gave us a little bit more description this time around, but he was facing away from Tanja at the time and not talking all that loudly. So, she had to ask him to please repeat what he said, to which he rolled his eyes and gave a very brief description.

Once again I was the guinea pig, first he told me to demonstrate the "hip snap" that he had described to us. I gave it a try and was rewarded with him saying "well I'm not sure that he's a guy, but that was ok" (supposedly it's easier for guys to do, but its damn difficult to do something right the first time when you've only heard it described to you). At the time, I took that as a bit of a joke, but with everything else I'm now thinking he really was just being an ass!

Then he spent a few minutes demonstrating to Linda and Tanja how to roll by flipping me over in the water repeated and hoping I would somehow magically figure out what to do even though he wasn't giving me any hints as to what I was doing wrong each time he pulled me back up. Then he moved on to giving Linda personal instruction and ignoring Tanja and I. Eventually, Jeff started trying to show Tanja what to do when it became apparent that the instructor was going to be busy with Linda for a while. He has been kayaking before, but he's not an instructor. Still he tried his best.

This is when they realized that the kayak was not adjusted properly for Tanja. Her legs were moving around too much in the kayak and it was making things difficult for her. Jeff mentioned this to the instructor who responding by telling Tanja to adjust it herself. Which was finally the point that she'd had enough. The whole point in taking lessons for this was for the instructor to show us how to do things, but he kept wanting to just have us do it on our own which is overwhelmingly frustrating. Jeff did start to describe to her how to make the adjustments, but that wasn't the point. He wasn't the instructor and that is who should have been doing the adjustments, particularly because we don't even know that a properly adjusted kayak would feel like.

Tanja decided to forget the rest of the "lesson", but not wanting to ruin it for me she just went and changed in the locker room and then sat and watched the rest of the lesson. Honestly, I was getting really worried about her because she was gone a long time in that locker room and I thought she was upset. I was ready to go if she said she wanted to just get out of there when she came back, but she was smiling and told me to just keep going with the lesson.
Anyway, at some point while she was in there, the instructor finally decided to move on from giving Linda one-on-one instructions and show me what he had been showing her (it was another 10 or 15 minutes before he even realized Tanja had left…great instructor, eh? I wonder if he'd even have noticed if she were still in the water and flipped her boat and couldn't get out). Basically, he was trying to teach me how to do the roll with a paddle in my hand. Unfortunately he can't teach worth crap. Repeatedly, I would do what he described only to get my hand pinned against the side of the kayak and the paddle in my hand as he kept pressing the paddle down against the kayak. Yeah, I understand that the paddle is supposed to be against the kayak for proper positioning, but dammit when you are pressing it there forcefully watch out for my damn hand and don't dismissively say "everybody complains about it hurting their hand" in an insulting tone when I mention it. And again, he wasn't really giving me any hints as to what I was doing wrong each time. So I was learning jack shit. He was just becoming more short with me and forcing me to try it over and over again.

Eventually though, he ended up just telling me "well, we only have 5 more minutes. So I'm going to go play." What the hell!?! I thought this was supposed to be a lesson, not fun time for asshat to insult people and then ignore them. What the hell ever.

I just got out and quickly changed in the lockerroom. When I came out, I was greeted with more proof that the meetup was ill planned as the instructor got bitchy about the money. We were told it would be $10 each, which I thought was pretty reasonable considering it was supposed to be a basic lesson for beginners (though having experienced the “lesson” I’d say it was too much). Anyway, the guy wanted us to pay $25 each. Apparently there is a $10 fee per person to use the pool for an hour plus there was an additional $15 per person for the lesson. If I had known that beforehand I would have skipped it as we are trying to budget our money better and $50 is just too much to try out something that we will likely never actually use, especially with this crappy instructor.

Once we straightened that shit out (and no, I did not pay $25 for each of us for this shitty experience) we started to leave. But the instructor wasn’t finished insulting us just yet. He just had to tell Tanja “sorry you FAILED so quickly!”

That is total bullshit. I don’t care who or what you are teaching, but you should never tell somebody they are a failure because you aren’t good enough to actually teach anything. He didn’t once try to help her with anything he was having us do. He didn’t once give her a word of encouragement. He didn’t once even try talking her into getting back in the kayak. Hell he didn’t even notice she had gotten out of the water until over half and hour had passed. And then he had the audacity to insult her for it!?! That is just fucking wrong.

Jeff tried to invite us to go out and have some drinks with the others, but we’d had enough and there was just no way we were going to spend any more time around that instructor.

I guess all of the meetups can be good, but this was a seriously bad one and I am definitely sorry we tried it out, because all I really got out of it was a bruised head and an even worse bruised hand.

Happy Things:

Sushi. It wasn’t that long ago that Jerm, Krissi, John, and Maddie introduced me to sushi, but I really love it now. Tanja and I have gone out for it several times and enjoyed it each time. This morning I had to stop at Krogers to get something to eat (I didn’t even have the energy to eat something for breakfast this morning) and I just happened to notice their fresh sushi. Now, I am not going to claim it was amazing sushi, but it did taste good and it really satisfied me when I ate it. Hmmm, hmmm, good.