CrossFit Athletic Group

I taught my first full-fledged high school class today. I’ve been working with Coach T for a couple of months now, so he let me have the reins for an entire class period. I had 50 minutes with 50 high schoolers, and even though most of them still don’t believe I’m actually older than all of them, I’m alive to tell the tale! Here’s an account of the day from my perspective: 

Class officially starts at 7:25, although the students usually roll in anytime between 7:10 and 7:30 (or later). And regardless of when we actually get around to starting class, the students will not tolerate being held past 8:06, even though their class doesn’t officially end until 8:11. It’s a tough crowd, so I don’t expect everyone to be doing exactly what I want them to, but I have a plan for the day:

Attendance

Dynamic warmup: Tabata hollow rock (mats), squats, push-ups – 4 cycles each

Whole-group practice: Handstand progressions

1.     Wall facing hold = 3 sets, 10 seconds
2.     Kick-up progressions = lunge, lunge tip, lunge tip lift off (partner spot)
3.     Partner spotting rules

Whole-group practice: Forward rolls / dive rolls
1.     Somersaults
2.     Forward roll progressions = stalling, elbows in, legs curled, legs straight
3.     Dive roll progressions = jump over partner
 
Stations: 5 minutes at each station, 8-10 people per station
Quickly demo precision jumping and vaults
1.     Rope climbs – need a coach
2.     Dive rolls
3.     Precision jumping
4.     Vaults
5.     Handstand – need a coach
6.     Mini WOD – 2v2 relay race – need a timer/assistant. As Many Partner Rounds as possible in 4 minutes 
i.  3 burpees
ii. sprint to baseline and back
iii. 10 air squats

I set the gym up with each station well before class starts and I start at exactly 7:25 to maximize the amount of time I have for the lesson. I shout to the class so (almost) everyone can hear me, and we start the warmup after a couple minutes of complaining and slowly moving to the right attendance spot. I try to cut down on dead time by timing the TABATA warmup while I take attendance, but it takes me almost the entire warmup (6 minutes total) to finish checking off all 50 kids. I’m pretty sure I missed a kid here and there. So far not so great, and the kids can tell I’m distracted because it looks like half of them are squatting and half are standing still or walking over to their friend’s spot to chat. After the warmup is finally over with, I have to teach handstands and forward rolls in… I look at the clock and it’s already 7:32. Great. So I tell students to get with their partners that they work out with in the weight room, and some students only heard part of what I said because they start running into the weight room. After I wrangle them back out to the gym floor, it’s 7:34 and we can finally start getting something done! Eventually I got all of the students to try one 10-second handstand hold against the wall, no kick-up involved. I originally planned to go through kick-up progressions “quickly,” but realized it would probably take the rest of the time just to get them to stand where I wanted them to. So I skipped that. On to the forward rolls. They seem pretty straight-forward to someone who can do them with their eyes closed, but when I tell students to “practice 2” it becomes into a human bowling ball fest. I cut that short and demo a dive roll and a kick-up to handstand on the wall, then after a quick demo of the other stations, I send them off to the stations. I think some kids set the world record for the longest time it takes to walk 10 meters. I originally planned to spend 5 minutes at each station, so I set the gym clock and get the mini-WOD station going.

Then I breathe. A weird sense of calm comes over me, and I see students actually doing vaults, and rolling, and holding handstands, and jumping across tires. The only word to describe it was just.

Cool.

Then it was over.

After about 2 minutes, people start to move to other stations, chase each other around the gym (really? Did I get transported to Chris’s preschool class?), and it looks to me like no one is accomplishing anything. I cut the time short and try to get people moving to different stations, but now it seems like everyone has had enough of this charade I’m putting on. It’s a good thing I’m not going to have my own class of these hooligans someday…

It’s in that moment where I feel like everything is going wrong that I start to enjoy myself. I start to notice kids are all skipping dive rolls to do vaults again or try kicking up to a handstand, falling and laughing and trying to do handstand push-ups to get back up. I see kids doing some crazy improvisations on the vaults, and it looks like a lot of fun. For 8 o’clock on a school day, there’s not much more I can ask of these kids than to enjoy trying some of the new skills they saw me demo.

I continue the cycle of: start the timer, make sure the workout station starts doing something resembling a workout, encourage kids to have handstand hold contests and try precision landing from a new spot, notice kids are getting bored, cut the time short, and herd everyone to their next station. I look at the clock and it’s 8:08, and it’s time to call it a day. Coach T calls everyone into a tight circle, and I’m dreading the speech he’s going to give them about how unproductive they were because I know it’s my fault.

For those of you who know Coach T, you will know what happens next:

Nothing.

To me, it seemed like no one did much of anything, but Coach T got the chance to watch a little and he picked out the few good things that happened: students were trying new things, and they were enjoying it.

Coach T starts by asking the class to thank me for the lesson, and when he asks if anyone learned anything, a lot more kids that I thought raise their hands. One girl even exuberantly exclaims, “I really did! We should do this all the time!” Which probably means she just liked having a free-for-all kind of day, but I’ll choose to take it as a compliment. We have a little recap and that’s it, the first and worst lesson I’ve ever taught is over. I guess it can only go up from here!

Today, I learned a LOT in those 50 minutes: the first being that the average high schooler’s attention span is about 2 minutes. Second, school is not fun and sometimes kids just need to be kids, regardless of how old those “kids” really are. Third, being a good teacher is harder than anything I’ve ever experienced, but when things go well even for a little while it makes it all worth it. And finally, I have a long way to go to become a good teacher, but at least according to one of the best teachers I know, I’m on the right track. I have a list of things I need to tweak up, but I’m already looking forward to going back into the line of fire.