Column by Kelly McKewin
I had strategically planned to have an easy course load this semester. It’s my senior spring. These last few months are supposed to be for slacking off in class so I can simultaneously be incredibly responsible by applying for a few hundred jobs during the week and extremely irresponsible by goofing off with friends every weekend. The goal was to take four, maybe five classes, and tie up the loose ends left on my DAR—nothing too complicated, as the worst classes are behind me.
That didn’t work out so well for me—I still had a capstone to take, a required programming class, and two other classes with extremely dense reading and writing assignments each week. And yet, halfway through this semester, bogged down with all this work, the hardest class I’m taking is probably the least expected culprit: ice skating.
Ice skating was supposed to be my one true blow off class of the semester—a two credit hour filler course that I’m just in to pad out my schedule. It’s taken pass/fail, and graded almost entirely based on attendance. And even the attendance policy is lenient: don’t miss more than five classes.
And yet, I’ve found myself stressing about ice skating more than any other course I’m in.
This is mostly because I am utterly, terribly, horribly bad at ice skating. Prior to this class, I’d been on ice skates exactly three times: once on a date in high school (which lasted about 20 minutes because neither of us could skate), once during Miami Welcome Week freshman year (which lasted about 10 minutes because a girl in my dorm broke her finger), and once on a date earlier this year (which lasted about an hour because my boyfriend wanted me to give it “a real chance”).
Needless to say, showing up to class on the first day, I barely knew how to lace up my skates, nevermind how to stay upright on the ice. I spent most of the lesson clutching the wall for dear life and somehow still managed to fall face first during a demonstration on how to safely stand up if you fall.
The second day, it became remarkably clear that out of the 50 people in my section, I was the worst one. The class had been divided into four groups based on skill level and speed, and I was in group four, the slowest and least experienced of the bunch. I had expected to end up in that group, but I hadn’t expected for my inexperience to still stand out so much there. Yet, I was being lapped by the other slow skaters—they’d make it up and down the ice twice during a drill, while I was still stumbling across the halfway point of the rink.
The third day, it was clear I might be a lost cause when it came to skating. We had started to learn slightly more advanced skills, like snowplow stops and backwards skating, and while some of the class was struggling with those things, I was still struggling with everything. How was I supposed to learn how to stop when I couldn’t figure out how to go? How does backwards skating work when you can’t go forwards?
I had by this point learned to do a kind of walk/wobble on my skates, so I could leave the safety of the wall and at least pretend to be doing what everyone else was doing. This didn’t work very well for me. It was painfully clear that I had no idea what I was doing when everyone would be instructed to go to one side of the rink and everyone else would smoothly glide over in a matter of seconds, while I’d be slowly clip-clopping along on my skates, trudging over the ice like I was working my way through a pile of quicksand. I could feel other people in the class staring at me pitifully whenever this happened, clearly wondering why the hell I was still bothering to show up.
By the fourth day, the skating instructor had clearly started to wonder the same thing, because he asked me to stay after class to talk about how I was doing.
He was really nice about it—I can’t fault him for that—and he gave me a few suggestions on how I could improve, but I was still incredibly mortified. Out of everyone there, I was the worst skater, and everyone knew it. Not only that, but I had been asked to stay after class “to talk about how I was doing.” In all my years of school, I’d never been asked to stay after class before. Getting asked to stay after class was what happened to the slackers in high school who didn’t turn in their essays on “To Kill A Mockingbird” or who had failed a pre-calc exam for the third time. Even in college, I’d only seen it happen when a professor would pull aside a frat guy who’d only shown up to class twice to tell them they were in danger of failing their midterm. And here I was in ice skating being told that I wasn’t very good and should definitely put some time in on the weekends if I wanted to improve.
This ice skating course has stressed me out more than anything else this semester, but in a different way than I’m used to. When I stress in other classes, it’s because there’s a consequence for failure. If I don’t code an app or I don’t design a good logo or I don’t do the reading, I’ll get a bad grade on the assignment, maybe a bad grade in the class, and it’ll affect my GPA and my future. At the same time, school is the one thing I’ve been good at for most of my life. From elementary school to now, I’ve known how to get good grades—I know how to write papers, I know how to study for tests, I know how to get my homework done on time and earn participation points. There’s certainly subjects I struggle in more than others—I have to put a lot more effort into passing physics or biology than I do into passing an English class—but at the end of the day, passing a class comes down to knowing how to memorize things and demonstrate those things on an exam, in a paper, or in a project.
I don’t have the same kinds of pressures in ice skating that I do in other courses—it’s not going to wreck my GPA or ruin my life if I fail—but I’m also not sure I can “learn” it in the same way I’ve “learned” things in previous classes I’ve struggled in. It’s a physical activity. You can’t bullshit your way through it the way you can a Miami Plan anthropology course, and even if you could, why would you want to?
For once in my life, I’m trying to learn something purely for the fun of it. Ice skating isn’t something that I’ll ever need to know, but I want to figure it out to have a skill in general life. And yet, skating is really, really hard. It can be a struggle to learn. And when you’ve spent your entire life being naturally good at learning things, or at least being able to feign being naturally good at learning things, it can be scary to feel like you’re struggling with picking up a new skill.
I know it’s all about practicing. Skating is one of those things you learn by doing repeatedly, and I know that the more I get on the ice, the better I’ll get at it. I’m still the worst skater in my class, but I already feel better at it than I did day one, and when I recently went skating on a date, I was actually able to semi-keep up throughout the night. It’s something I can learn, with a lot of effort and time, and I’m hopeful that I will by the end of the semester. And in the meantime, I’ve learned that it’s not always the senior capstone that teaches you the most or causes you the most stress—sometimes it’s the blow-off filler class that’s the most invaluable.