(Untitled)

[pozorvlak]

Whenever I teach somebody to contact juggle (if you don't know what I'm talking about, this video's quite good), I always start by asking the same question:

"Do you know how to ski?"

Skiing and contact juggling, you see, work in

Comments

[necaris]

That's a really fascinating parallel! I imagine the difference is one of scale, really, so if you can find someone who can leap into the air as easily as they can throw a ball into the air, they might benefit from learning hop turns first...

(I say this as something who is terrified of skiing generally and the concept of hop turns in particular)

[pozorvlak]

Yes, I suppose so - teaching hop turns to your class first would quickly result in all but the fittest of your students getting knackered. Might be a good way to quiet down a class of rowdy kids...

I say this as something who is terrified of skiing generally and the concept of hop turns in particular
Nah, the scary thing is the kind of terrain where hop turns are needed :-)

[half_of_monty]

Also the wobbliest of your kids would fall over and then decide that they couldn't ski and didn't want to try. Would certainly have been my response.

[ext_5743]

I was first taught to ski by a guy called Simon, who had once taught skiing in the Army. His "fast-food" technique was beautifully simple. Get people to put skis on and stand up in a line. Then make them mime opening a can of baked beans, and mime pouring the beans into the front of their ski boots. Explain to them that they need to stand with their ankles flexed and knees slightly bent, crushing the imaginary beans between shin and boot. Having explained this, and deprived of ski poles, we were then encouraged to slide down a gentle slope and come to a stop naturally, keeping the skis parallel (like "chips"). We were then told to lean our weight onto one foot or the other in order to steer, and given a slalom to do, again on a gentle slope. The final stage was the snowplough ("pizza"), initially as a stop and then as a turn. The whole thing took about an hour and a half with 10 of us

[atreic]

Neither the hand nor the ball, exactly - the ball goes up and down (like the skier - and I don't think this is just a frame-of-reference thing, because the ball accelerates and decellerates as it goes up and down, and also there's The World as a common frame of reference for truth here) and so the ball is like the skier, but the hand rotates, like the skis of the skier rotate.

But if I had to pick one, I'd say the hand, because it's which thing rotates that is more crucial to the movement.

Which did you have in mind?

[pozorvlak]

I think of the ball as being more like the skier, because of the direction of the movement and the forces. But you're right, one can argue it either way, and the analogy's not exact in either case.