The Cycle of Learning

The Cycle of Learning

How has your Friday the 13^th been so far? My sister’s has been about as disastrous as it gets. First of all she woke up with a One Direction song playing endlessly in her head (‘Baby you light up my life like nobody else etc.’) and then she discovered that she was sharing her morning shower with a gigantic spider. I like to think that the moment she saw said spider was a bit like that scene in Arachnophobia when the spider jumps on the girl’s head. Although, let’s be honest, the spider was probably more upset than she was to find a blonde giant in his new hotel. And now she’s had to go and teach a class of Italian teenagers how to speak English. It’s their last day of summer school, they don’t care, and apparently there’s already a web of complicated love triangles between The Three Eduardo’s. I like to think of them as not being unlike The Three Musketeers, but with Italian accents, raging hormones and a packet of parma ham in their backpack.

I love hearing her stories about her kids at the summer school. Apparently the Italians never shut up. The Chinese are very studious but they hate playing games. The Greeks are all there to learn. She has been playing the ‘yes/no game’ with them, where they are not allowed to reply yes or no to a question. Question (Destiny’s Child): Did I need to explain that? What does it say about me (or YOU) that I did? Anyway, moving on…. Apparently they were asking the boys, ‘Is your boyfriend Justin Bieber?’ Cue panicked looking Italian 14 year old, desperately wracking his brains for an answer, eventually coming up with, ‘Maybe?’ At which point all the kids repeat ‘maybe, ha ha!’ and fall about laughing. Do you feel old when I tell you that none of the kids know who Britney Spears is? Alana said, ‘come on, ‘Toxic’?’ Nope.  Nothing.  Zilch. And here I was thinking that I was relatively on trend having ‘Circus’ on my i-pod. Relative, that is, to the rest of my playlist. (Neil Diamond and Joan Baez anyone?)

In other news, my new American passport has finally arrived, yay! They haven’t rejected me! I have somehow slipped under the Yankee net once again. It was taking so long to come that I was starting to fear they would say ‘not this time’ on the grounds of being a Bad American i.e. I’ve never actually tasted pumpkin pie and we have never had a Thanksgiving meal in my house. However, I do feel I have just the requisite amount of WHOOP WHOOP! attitude, self-belief, outlandish size teeth and partiality to trans-fats to keep me in dual citizenship for the next ten years (when my current passport expires and I’ll be 41. Oh God.) It’s a relief since it was such a bloody nightmare getting my photo done. For American passports you can’t just have a regular photo booth picture done. Oh no. It has to be done in colour, by a specialist photographer, with ridiculously specific details on mm distance eyes from mouth etc. It’s a bit like measuring the shorts of a flea when it comes to how much white background you can have from the edges. And then the dude that took my picture kept complaining that my hair was ‘too fluffy’ and I needed to smooth it down more. Well, sorry mister, I have frizzy hair, it’s called GENES!! I already had about 500 Kirby grips in my hair, but he kept frowning at every picture he took, muttering ‘no, no good, too fluffy, America is the strictest you know’. Eventually, obviously despairing of my hair’s refusal to stay down, he came over and smoothed it all down for me himself, rearranging all my grips for me.

That was fun.

 This weekend is the last of the Les Mills launches I am required to do THANK GOD. Don’t get me wrong, I obviously love teaching and the launches are really fun, but it is also incredibly stressful. Every three months we (instructors) get sent new choreography to learn, and you have 3-4 weeks to get your head around what might be 1 to 9 routines to learn – dependent on how many programmes you teach. The cycles goes like this: Excitement about new releases – deciding which tracks are your favourite etc. Enthusing to all your members about how much you love the new attack. Listening to the music endlessly – in your car, at home, at work etc. Practising anywhere you can (for me, this means standing outside our offices with a stick at lunchtimes practising pump, getting weird looks from the crew if they happen to be filming nearby). Then, as the launch date approaches, mild panic starts to set in and you wonder how you are possibly going to learn 8 tracks by 5pm tomorrow. You swing between panicking about the choreography, and feeling totally fed up. You decide that you never want to learn anything else in your life again, EVER. At the 11^th hour you have to get real: the cool down is going to be freestyle. 10 minutes before the launch you have no idea whether it’s a double step touch or a squat tap, or a 2/2 or 3/1. The launch starts. Everyone else seems to know more than you. Without fail you get something wrong – never the part of the choreo you were worried about though. The launch finishes. You feel a massive sense of relief. Cue champagne, relaxed shoulders, sleep, excited messages on Facebook.

Then you realise there’s only 2 months left before it all starts again.

OVERHEARD AT THE GYM

Fitness Instructor: I only make £6 an hour on the gym floor. Rubbish. I used to make more than that selling drugs.