You Just Need the Right Teacher

August 2003

It was 2023. My friend sat on the edge of the pool dangling her feet while I frolicked in the water like a dolphin. “I’m too scared to go in,” she said. “I tried to learn once as an adult but I was scared and the teacher left me at the side of the pool to teach everyone else.”

I thought how my friend must have felt: discarded, unimportant and scared.

I think about swimming a lot. It’s what I do to clear the cobwebs and get rid of anxious negative thoughts. Slicing through the water is a comfort. I had to pass on this love of the water to my children.

It was 2002. I had just arrived in Canada. My second daughter was 3. I wanted to continue the swimming lessons I’d started in Jamaica. I hired a swim instructor. My daughter Jade looked at the pool and clung to me. Thinking back on it now, the pool must have seemed so different than in Jamaica where the pool was outside, warm and the water glittered in the sun. This indoor pool was deep and dark, and the water was cold. Jade didn’t want to go in. She protested, clinging to me. “Maybe this sport is not for your daughter,” said the swim instructor. “You should find another sport.” The scowl on my face deepened in annoyance.

“Swimming is not just a sport to me,” I said irritably. “It is a life skill.” I never hired that instructor again. I put my daughter in swim classes with the city and she is now a good swimmer. My four children had classes with the City of Toronto or Mississauga and all love the water. One went on to springboard diving and surfing. Two of them became lifeguards and swim instructors, teaching children after school.

Peta-Gaye, 2 years old. The pool is being built

It was 1971. I was three years old. My maternal grandfather had just built a pool. He had bowed legs which the doctor said would get worse with time. Swimming would be the only exercise he could do. Grandpa insisted all his grandchildren learn to swim. My mother enrolled me in swimming lessons with a woman who dunked the kids and was harsh in her approach. When my mother rushed over to dry my tears with a handkerchief, this woman shouted, “Stop interfering. Go back and sit down.” My mother, a soft gentle woman in her early twenties, was humiliated at this rebuke in front of all the other parents. She took me out of that class and enrolled me in another class with a man called Gary Nash. Gary Nash and his four brothers had swum and played water polo for Jamaica. A lifetime later, this man would become my father-in-law. He was kind and gentle and taught thousands of children and adults to swim.

Gary Nash, swim teacher extraordinaire and best father-in-law ever

I remember my teachers - the ones who were kind and the ones who were not so kind. When I listen to the stories of my friends, acquaintances and former students, I hear stories of teachers and coaches who called them stupid, dumb, or dunce, made them wear a dunce cap, or have them kneel on concrete floors, who hit their knuckles with a stick while playing the piano, who said the most hurtful unkind things. It breaks my heart. I am outraged. When I hear people say ‘I”m not good at math’ or ‘I tried to swim, but I can’t’, I listen for the back story. The back story usually contains a character who criticized or said something negative. That’s the last thing we need to hear when we’re embarking on learning a new skill. No-one tells a child who is learning to walk that they’re bad at it, that maybe they shouldn’t bother to try, or that they are taking too long to learn. No-one screams at a child or hits their calves when they’re learning to walk. We don’t frown, roll our eyes and throw our hands in the air in frustration. We praise the child every brilliant new step of the way. Encourage and clap our hands. Thrust our arms open to let them know if they fall, we’re there to pick them back up.

Peta-Gaye, 9 years old. Can swim like a fish

Many of us have a back story of a time when we tried to learn something and someone’s words discouraged us. If you have the interest in learning, I’d say start again with a new teacher - the right teacher. There is much truth in the phrase ‘you’re never too old to learn.’ It is important to recognize that we are more than capable of learning a great many things: swimming, technology, a new language, writing, and the list goes on. Of course, that’s not to say we’ll be experts at everything. I know that I might improve my singing with a great teacher, but I’ll never be an expert. That doesn’t stop me though, from belting out a tune in the privacy of my own house, even when aforementioned children beg me to stop.