Swimming Lessons

Remember this? At the end of last summer, Girly-Girl was this close to swimming independently.

I started the summer determined to sign her up for every session, thinking this would be the year she learned to swim. We even considered buying a pool, but decided to wait until both children were a hair more competent.

Girly Girl started the first session a little scared and wouldn’t even bob at first. But a day or two into the second week, she lost her fear and roared forward. At the last lesson, her teacher said she’d met most of the skills to pass Level I and was making excellent progress on the remaining ones.

So I signed them up for second session. The first day, we saw eight children in her class. Keep in mind, these are children who do not even tread water, in water too deep to stand. Eight is the maximum number allowed. So I was a little disappointed. The teacher, however, was one of our favorites (in fact, she’s the instructor in the photo I posted last year). So I left them in the class.

Big mistake! Her assistant was very, very young (I’d say 14 at the most, and probably 12), and he obviously had had NO experience whatsoever.

Call me stupid, but I have to question whether the best place to get your first experience is in a maximum size, Level I class with a handicapped child in it.

It was a disaster. She didn’t trust the boy (probably picked up on his insecurity), so every time he made her try something, she’d kick and scream and throw a fit. Not knowing how to handle her strong will, he would either try to reason with her or force her (neither was effective). So a huge portion of each class period was spent with Girly-Girl, doing nothing productive.

Which meant the other kids (including Mad Scientist) got bored. When the teachers are working with individual students, the other six are supposed to just hang on the wall. They can bob if they want, but that’s about it. Mad Scientist spent much of his time taking a mouthful of water and making a fountain out of it (EEEUUWWW). It’s not allowed, but these teachers weren’t paying attention.

The two girls on either side of Girly-Girl were quite close to swimming, and they used their time to practice. They aren’t supposed to let go of the wall with both hands, but as I said, the teachers weren’t watching.

One of the girls was practicing the crawl stroke, swimming parallel to the wall. She only had about two feet of space between Girly-Girl and the other person on her other side, but she’d “swim” back and forth, back and forth the whole time. She really didn’t have any control though: she barely stayed afloat, and she flailed a lot, splashing and grabbing rather frantically for the wall. So routinely, Girly-Girl was getting splashed in the face. Even worse, she spent much of her time bobbing, staying under for increasingly long times, and I could just picture her coming up at the end of long time, completely out of the breath, and being pushed back under by the flailing arms of the other girl.

That wasn’t the worst though. The worst was when this inexperienced boy took her out to do things. The real teacher, the experienced one, is a master at pushing every child just a hair past her comfort zone, and this teacher never made Girly-Girl swim independently, not even as much as she is doing in last year’s photo. But the boy…sigh. He had a task to do, and he did it. He was “supposed” to have each child do a task (jelly fish floats, back floats, Superman glides, whatever) and then send them back to the wall in a glide. So, by golly, he was going to do it. He was never successful, mind, but it didn’t stop him from trying.

So as the week passed, she became increasingly frightened. One by one, she stopped doing all of her skills. At one point, he took her out to do a back float. Now, she used to be really good at the back floats–heck, you don’t have to duck your face, and that’s what she really hates. But by this point, she was afraid to go out into the pool with this boy, period. So she fought him: clung to his face and/or his chest, wrapped her knees around his arm, etc. He was supposed to support her under her shoulders and knees and pull her through the water as if she was kicking, so she could feel the flow of water around her. But he was rattled by her refusing to cooperate. So instead of pulling her head first, where the water would flow from her head down to her feet, he was pulling her feet first, so the water rushed up toward her face. And because he was focused on her knees wrapped around his arm, he didn’t notice her head repeatedly ducking under the water.

That was the Wednesday before I left for Ellensburg. Girly-Girl spent the entire session screaming, “No, NO! I don’t want to do it. I can’t do that. Mommy, help!” And of course, ALL the parents on the benches were talking about my child, and by the end of the session, I was in tears. This was 80 percent of the way through her second session at Level I this summer–and she had lost every skill she started the session with except bobbing alone at the wall (where she has control and doesn’t have to trust an incompetent “teacher”).

We didn’t bother going back for the last two days of class. I was out of town, remember, so it would have been the babysitter’s task to do, and frankly, we didn’t see the point in asking a babysitter to take the kids to swim lessons so that our daughter could be further traumatized taking lessons that were degrading the few skills she DID have.

We didn’t do session III because we were in Arizona. When we got home, I tried to get the kids into swimming lessons at the local gym instead (she can stand up in their pool, so it’s less frightening), but they didn’t have openings.

She’s drawn to water: fountains, ponds, rivers, pools, and I really want her to at least dog paddle in case she falls in. So when it was time to register for session IV, I took a deep breath and signed her up in the smallest class (four children, counting my two). After all, she’s had seven successful sessions at this pool, and only the one bad experience.

Sigh. Today was the first day we went. Their teacher had been replaced for some reason by the pool’s general manager. His assistant is, again, very young, but there were only three children there, and she reminded me of their very favorite babysitter, so I thought it might be OK.

Well. Not two minutes into the class, the teacher was holding my daughter in the pool. She was shrieking, “NO! I DON’T WANNA! LET ME GO! MOMMY!” I was standing behind the benches, and the woman in front of me said, “Oh, we’ve got another screamer.” My heart fell, but it got worse. “No wonder he (she motioned to the teacher) said, ‘This is the last time I teach Level I!”

I tried to explain she’d had a bad experience at the last class, and the woman (appropriately appalled to realize the mother of this child was literally standing behind her) tried to backpedal. “Oh, I just said that because yesterday it was my son who was screaming.” Her son wasn’t even in the pool: he was sitting beside her on the bench.

Anyway, the lesson went on. I had to walk away. I went to the park next door and cried through the whole thing. I called Mars out of a meeting at work, and he thinks we should just pull her out and never take her again. Which isn’t a bad idea! My friend ELF watched last week as a woman had a seizure in this same pool, and the lifeguard on duty just stood and watched, even when her friends, desperately trying to get the woman to the pool’s edge, cried to the lifeguard, “Hey! Give us a hand here!”

But there isn’t another option–I already looked. And I really think it’s important. And I know that Girly Girl doesn’t like change, but once she gets accustomed, she often does really well with a new teacher. And by the end of the lesson, she actually had had two, significant, confidence-building experiences today.

But I must admit…I’m not at all sure I have the stamina to sit through another class like this one.