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Last weekend, D and I went to WildFire, which was a GRAND success in lots of ways. ( cut for fire-eating photos! ) But the thing I was most nervous about wasn't weekend camping in cold weather with N, or eating fire, or an all-day class schedule, but the stilt class I'd rescued from oblivion by signing up to teach. So, the way these classes go is that the Wildfire folks set up the class schedule ahead of time, and when you go in to the site to volunteer for work shifts, you can also volunteer to teach certain classes. I imagine that for the more unusual classes, people are lined up ahead of time, but that's certainly not true for all of them.
So, days and weeks passed, and nobody had signed up to teach the stilt class. Apparently there was some noise on the Wildfire Tribe board about whether the class would have to be cancelled; D alerted me to this, and I signed up, since, hell, I stilt! I've taught people to stilt! I like teaching things! But as the class drew closer, I thought about all the problems with this. Stilting isn't like poi or hooping or something where you can stand in front of a group of people and instruct them all at once. Taking someone up on stilts for the first time is, by its nature, almost completely serial. Strap them in for ten minutes, hold their hand, give them balance pointers as they stagger about, things like that. How on earth do you make a CLASS out of that? Well, whatever -- we'll make it work somehow, I thought. I moved on to conquering my nerves by building a bunch of new stilts, figuring that the main role of the class leader would be "have a ton of stilts for people to try on", and that I would even have the added bonus qualification "owns two pairs of bouncy stilts".
But this is a crowd that contains a lot of serious circus nerds, and since my class was in the next to last slot, I kept having the following conversation:
"I'm XXXX! Who are you?"
"Hi, I'm Molly."
"Oh! Molly! Are you the one teaching Intro to Stilt Walking?"
"Yep!"
"Oh wow! I'm really looking forward to that, and so are these twenty people standing behind me and smiling!"
[everyone waves.]
Yeah, so, no pressure.
But in the end, it came off well. I didn't actually "teach a stilt class" -- I brought a bunch of gear, talked for a couple of minutes about how to use it, and then the two or three other stilters came out of the woodwork and we were getting four people up at a time on different stilts using different methods. It felt more like "facilitating a collaborative stilt workshop" than "teaching a group of people how to stilt", but since that was really the most appropriate way to do it, in the end I'm not really bothered. Also, several people ran excitedly up to me afterwards to thank me enthusiastically for the experience, so I can't have mucked it up TOO badly!
In conclusion, um, I'd do it again and it was fun!
So, days and weeks passed, and nobody had signed up to teach the stilt class. Apparently there was some noise on the Wildfire Tribe board about whether the class would have to be cancelled; D alerted me to this, and I signed up, since, hell, I stilt! I've taught people to stilt! I like teaching things! But as the class drew closer, I thought about all the problems with this. Stilting isn't like poi or hooping or something where you can stand in front of a group of people and instruct them all at once. Taking someone up on stilts for the first time is, by its nature, almost completely serial. Strap them in for ten minutes, hold their hand, give them balance pointers as they stagger about, things like that. How on earth do you make a CLASS out of that? Well, whatever -- we'll make it work somehow, I thought. I moved on to conquering my nerves by building a bunch of new stilts, figuring that the main role of the class leader would be "have a ton of stilts for people to try on", and that I would even have the added bonus qualification "owns two pairs of bouncy stilts".
But this is a crowd that contains a lot of serious circus nerds, and since my class was in the next to last slot, I kept having the following conversation:
"I'm XXXX! Who are you?"
"Hi, I'm Molly."
"Oh! Molly! Are you the one teaching Intro to Stilt Walking?"
"Yep!"
"Oh wow! I'm really looking forward to that, and so are these twenty people standing behind me and smiling!"
[everyone waves.]
Yeah, so, no pressure.
But in the end, it came off well. I didn't actually "teach a stilt class" -- I brought a bunch of gear, talked for a couple of minutes about how to use it, and then the two or three other stilters came out of the woodwork and we were getting four people up at a time on different stilts using different methods. It felt more like "facilitating a collaborative stilt workshop" than "teaching a group of people how to stilt", but since that was really the most appropriate way to do it, in the end I'm not really bothered. Also, several people ran excitedly up to me afterwards to thank me enthusiastically for the experience, so I can't have mucked it up TOO badly!
In conclusion, um, I'd do it again and it was fun!
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