Stand up!

I was talking with one of my students about snow sports the other day and he said he’d been terrified of skiing ever since he was a junior high school student. He’d gone on a big ski-trip with his school, his first time on the snow. After they had strapped in, they put all the kids on the lift up to the top of the beginner slope. In Japan, a lot of the instructors for beginners are either Canadians or Kiwis who work the slopes while it’s summer or off-season in their own countries. So this kid has jumped on the lift, ridden to the top and then stacked it as soon as he’s got to the top and fallen in front of where everyone is getting off. This huge gaijin guy comes running towards him and starts yelling “STAND UP! STAND UP! STAND UP!” and the kid totally freaks out and tries to run away, except he’s wearing skis and lying on the ice and all he ends up doing is falling over again and cracking his head. He’s lying there stunned and the gaijin is trying to get them to stop the lift and meanwhile every other student is piling off the lift and falling straight on top of him.

He said he hadn’t been skiing since.

The best part of the whole story was when he did the “stand up” part, he was yelling and actually put on a very convincing Canadian accent and threw his arms around in the air. Coming from a student who had ten minutes previously asked me how to spell “May” and still hasn’t quite worked out the names of the days of the week in English, this surprised me a little. Great story though.

Posted in Schooled on Wednesday February 1, 2006.