Winter is coming soon and that means so does the ski season. I’m excited to be able to go back to Mountain Creek with my friends and even Campgaw occasionally. Ramapo offers a ski club at the school which allows students to get bus rides up to Mountain Creek and back home every few weeks.
           

When I was younger, about two years ago, I worked at Campgaw, it was my first job. My friends and I figured that it was best to work there because we all loved to ski and it was relatively close to home. Almost every night, someone would pick everyone up with their ski stuff and drive to Campgaw to work from 5:00 to 7:30. The actual job wasn’t that difficult at all, on school nights, my friends and I would be given a large group of children ranging from the ages of three to seven. On weekends, however, I would be assigned to a specific child and be his instructor for an hour. For the hour I has with my assigned kid, I would be usually be teaching him or her the basic fundamentals of skiing. If a kid had previously taken lessons and was more advanced I would be able to teach them how to turn. On a good weekend, I would usually be capable of teaching about five to sex lessons in a day. I started to get really good at instructing and even developed a set plan for each kid I was going to teach. My friends did not work as much as I did, but it didn’t really have an impact on me because I started focusing on individual lessons. Some parents were sometimes hesitant when they saw that their kid was going to be taught by a 14-year old, but none ever complained to my manager. My manager was a cool guy, he was lenient with my schedule and taught me easier ways of teaching kids.
           

One day, my manager has assigned me to a little boy who was about four years old. The lesson was a typical hour session and the kid was able to grasp the concept of putting on his ski’s and going down the hill. About thirty minutes into the session, the boy insisted on going to the bathroom because he hadn’t earlier and wanted to go. His parents had left the area and the boy had kept persisting me. I went over to one of the older instructors who I knew had worked at Campgaw for multiple years, and asked if it were ok that I would take him to the bathroom. The instructor said yes, and so I took off the boy’s ski’s and him and I walked inside to the bathroom. I waited outside for him for about 5 minutes and when he was done we walked back outside. I walked back over to where I was originally instructing the kid, suddenly, my manager sprinted over to me with a woman next to him. The woman ran over and hugged the boy. She looked grateful and relieved, the woman turned out to be his mom. What had happened was that I didn’t follow one of the procedures that I was supposed to follow. My manager pulled me over and told me I wasn’t going to get in trouble, but I had to apologize to the mom for scaring her. She was completely infuriated, she was so angry with me for taking her child without her knowing that she wanted to get me fired. I just sat there and let her take her rage out on me, in a way it wasn’t my fault. The mom had not been there the entire time I instructed the kid, I had no idea to where she went and her kid was begging me to take him to the bathroom. From that point on, I learned to never take a kid out of the area I was instructing them unless informing my manager and the parents of the kid I was teaching.