I wish I took photos of the routes I threw up today but sadly I didn’t and going back to langford is a bit of a hassle for just some photos. That said this week I focused on setting for smaller children because I’ve been struggling with my coaching 3-4 year olds. This was my debut as setting and there was a lot of nerves behind it but I kept in mind what my 3-4 year olds are capable of and what kind of moves they enjoy doing and how they holistically route read. I started with creating their ideal route then tweaking it to force certain lessons I want to force. This thought process kind of turned my initial blog post on its head because I started as a learner who was forced to learn by myself with a tool that an unseen teacher provided me. Now I’m stepping in to that role of being the unseen teacher which has changed my perspective on climbing. The best part about my setting though was that even though it was built with my students in mind I saw a lot of drop ins that came in practicing really hard on my routes. I think the value behind the climbs I put up was more defined by how motivating they were. Not everyone was capable of doing it on their first try but with every attempt they learned more and more and the gradual release of information on the climb kept them interested. This is something I’m going to investigate more especially for next week when I step in to coach junior league next week.
Image generated with bing AI image generator. Prompt was to create a bouldering route. Tool accessible here
I liked the ability to control the speed at which I was learning at. Mostly this meant blocking oned day off to a specific subject instead of bouncing around multiple different subjects at once. I didn’t really experience any issues except for some small technological mishaps. I would probably pick hybrid style for learning so that I have the option to be in person if I want to. If we were to have to switch to online learning I’d suggest already understanding how to set up an online meeting and learning how to run one. Other than that I would also find some good online shared resources that students can engage with while also being involved with their peers. One thing I found that didn’t work was breakout rooms because most of the time people just wouldn’t say anything. I would probably use minecraft or another online game to teach science. One I’m familair with and very capable of setting up is starbound which is a space exploration game that allows you to mod it fairly easily with highly scientific concepts such as mutations and wiring.
Since I’ve started working at boulderhouse I’ve begun to feel a change in the way I think about climbing. I feel as if I started by approaching it as a learner but now I’m starting to see it more as a medium. This is largely due to the amount and variety of coaching I’ve been involved with. Before I saw each problem as a lesson waiting to be learnt but now I’m seeing them as a device to teach. With my change in perspective comes new goals that don’t align with the ones from my to do list post.
To start I’ve become less focused on grades as I’ve learned that they are subjective and discredit the climb most of the time. Grades are always being adjusted on outdoor climbs and indoor climbs its up to a setter to provide a grade. The problem I’ve realized with setters providing grades is that people don’t always agree with the grades and it becomes and object of obsession where now they are less focused on the climb and more on the colour tape associated with it. My goal now is to encourage my athletes to approach each climb as an isolated ungrade climb. That way they need to focus more on reading their climb and relating it to previous climbs they’ve done before with similar moves instead of comparing it to climbs of similar difficulty. This isn’t the easiest thing to do but it is crucial for competitive climbing where there are no grades.
This will be a useful skill to hold as a teacher though since engaging critical thinking is one of the core competnacies for every subject. Finding multiple ways to approach motivating my athletes to look past grades will cross over greatly to teaching in a highschool
Following this post my other posts will be more focused on how my climbing pedagogy will be evolving in order to better teach myself and my athletes as well as how those skills will be useful in highschool.
Image generated with the help of Bing ai image generation. Prompt was to create an image that represents how unimportant grades are in climbing. Tool accessible at this link
This week was a pretty tough week for me. I didn’t end up completing any of my goals. However, this is one thing that I think is incredible about climbing in general. It is a great teacher of humility which is why most climbers come off as very chill people. Failure and falling is part of the process but I am proud of myself for trying to do climbs outside of my range of abilities. I got pretty close to completing one but the sets this week have been pretty cruel. I also tried climbing at CARSA on campus this week where I got to meet a lot of other climbers and practice some moves that aren’t typically set in my gym. I like the vibe of CARSA because their are climbs that nobody could come up with a grade for and so it was just labelled with a question mark. To deal with my failure this week, which was a hard pill to swallow especially after the brutal week of school, I went for a run and finished my first mountain run which was a pretty big personal accomplishment in my opinion. Mount Tolmie is pretty close to my home so it turned out to only be a 4 kilometre run but I still enjoyed it despite it being relatively short. This is a good lesson for anyone. Just because you didn’t complete what you set out to do it doesn’t mean you didn’t get anything out of it. Learning is gradual and with time any goal can be accomplished. I’ve attached a piece of AI art that accurately reflects how I felt climbing this week.
This week I had a lot of fun generating images using AI. It is something I have tried before but it was fun to sit down with it in class. That said I personally don’t like the implications of AI art and it is something I as an artist don’t fully support because of its shameless use plagerism of other artists work. Drawing inspration from an artist is something I fully support and a great way for artists to develop their own style. I don’t really wanna encourage students to use ai art for personal gain but it could be beenficial for them to use it for something like a presentation or project. I included some of the art I generated this week.
This week was a slow one for climbing. I wasn’t able to get somebody to go top roping with me but instead I accomplished one of my goals I had previously outlined in my older blog post which you can find here. The goal I finished was doing five pull ups with 45 pounds strapped to my waist. It wasn’t as hard as I originally thought and it didn’t take much time for me to do it. This is fairly common in schooling where learners often are unsure of their own abilities. This leads to them procrastinating and performing under their capabilities. I’ve tried weighted pull ups before but I never integrated it into my training regiment so I had no idea what I was capable of but in the end what I thought would be a difficult task to achieve was quite easy. This is just another example of one of the many great reflections I’ve had thanks to rock climbing and I am forever grateful to the sport for all it’s taught me.
This weeks discussion surrounding the ways technology has opened my mind to just how much the education system has changed in the last 20 years. Every day new technology is created and the world becomes more accessible from the comfort at home. After class I was left with the anxiety of how to combat new emerging technology that could damper my learners work ethic. Now almost a week later my anxiety has subsided and I now have more of a drive to explore what is becomming accessible to the public. As I continue to explore the large world of new tech my mind has started racing with new ideas for activities to include in the classroom to help learners be better prepared for the future. I hope that as I grow older I’m able to remain technologically literate so that I can guide my students towards using different online tools in ways that will benefit their learning instead of letting them use it as a crutch and developing bad habits. I have no idea how I will work to keep up to date but if you are reading this future me you should communicate with younger teachers about what they are bringing in to the classroom and scaffold with them to come up with activites that could help educaate students on how to use emerging tech. I know you are capable future me, don’t let your anxiety destroy your adaptability. I love you and I’m proud of the person you’ve become.
Below is a list of tasks I’m determiend to accomplish before the end of the semester. Most of this probably won’t make sense to someone who hasn’t climbed before but I will do my best to explain each task as I describe the steps I’m taking to meet them.
The first task on the list is the one I’m most excited about so it will be the central focus of this post. All boulders are given a grade by person who establishes them. The grades start as low as VB (B for beginner) which is followed by V0. After V0 each climb is given a higher number to reflect its difficulty. The highest grade ever assigned to a boulder is V17 and only two people in the world have ever finished it. Also, depending on where you are from grades are presented differently but I’ll be sticking to V scores as it is the most popular grading style in North America. Along with a grade all established routes are given a name in order to give them more character. This is great as it gives your climb a sense of personality just like how all of our past teachers have had names relating to their cultural background. As great as this is, some climbers take this opprotunity and run with it. There is nothing more embarrising than telling someone your current project is foot fetish 1.0 and you are hoping to get started on fart blaster 200 by the end of the year.
The problem with grades however is that they are subjective levels of difficulty and one V3 can feel like a V0 to some climbers but like a V6 to others. Climbing gyms have worked around this issue by starting to adopt colour grading systems specific to the gym’s setting team. I’ll explain this more when I get down to the third task on the list. Since, gyms don’t typically have V graded boulders it’s hard to compare indoor progress to climbers who climb at different gyms. That is where the kilter board comes in. The kilter board is a universally set board with an adjustable wall angle. This means that if you’re gym has a kilter board it will have the exact same layout as a kilter board at another gym. On top of this any climber can set problems on the kilter board as it utilizes blue tooth on your phone to project climbs using leds on specific holds. Green holds are start holds, blue holds can be used in any way the climber wants, yellow holds are for feet only, and purple holds are the finish holds and typically require two hands on them in order to consider the climb complete. If a hold doesn’t have a colour than it can’t be used. This is definitly easier to show in video so I’ve attached a video of my most recent Kilter board climb called Hard Hard which is a V3 climb. If you go to any gym with a kilter board you can use the app to connect and put on that exact climb to also give it a try. VOLUME WARNING!!!
For reference this is the second hardest climb I’ve ever done on the kilter board and the hardest I’ve ever done has also been a V3. I have the board set to a 20 degree angle which is fairly easy as it is not too much of an overhang. I just want to be able to climb a V6 so any angle will do for me.
Grades are a great way of giving a student the feeling of progression and make it very easy to track improvement. As a teacher I’d like to implement something similar into my class where I provide a difficulty level with specific questions so as students further develop their understanding they can see that they are able to tackle more challenging problems. The system would have to be fairly easy to understand while also applicable to any topic. I think the grading would be dependent on the level of application as well as effort required. Climbing is kind of funny for that because a climb can have a difficult rating but it isn’t necessarily hard it will just be longer than typical requiring a greater level of focus and endurance. This is somewhat similar to classroom problems because not all assignments are that difficult but just require an extensive amount of work in order to meet expectations. Providing grading for specific questions in order for students to visualize the difficulty of a question could also be great for encouraging goal setting where students aim to accomplish a specific level similar to how I’m striving to climb higher difficulty climbs. I will mull over the idea more as I climb on the kilter board and reflect on it more as time passes. Anyways, next post I aim to provide an update on my kilter board progress and tackle explaining how sports route grading works and differs from bouldering.
After learning about FIPPA my understanding of how difficult it is to utilize different forms of media has come to fruition. I personally have a really hard time with providing proper sources and choosing which free use resources I should use. Moving forward I think I want to start creating my own graphics for presentations because I feel more comfortable using my own resources than trying to use others because now I have a lot of anxiety surrounding sourcing.
