I didn’t realize we still have a week left for this but to finish off my reflection of climbing and it’s relation to teaching pedagogy I will talk about the importance of connections. So much of what I have learned from climbing has been largely due to the people I have interacted with. One of my favorite parts of the climbing community is how willing people are to share lessons they’ve learned and provide insight into how you can apply specific techniques to make your climbing easier. I moved here in september but I have recieved so much useful information on how to effectively climb from strangers, coworkers, and even Guillaume. The same applies to teaching and how you are surrounded by valuable resources it’s just up to you to utilize those resources.
Image above generated with the help of Bing image generator accessible from this link
With this being my last blog post I wanted to finish off my thinking of climbing as a resource for developing pedagogy with discussing how expansive I am beginning to percieve climbing. Climbing by itself is a sport that is made up of traditional, sport and bouldering. Each of those section rely on the use fo different gear but all incorporate the same moves. Those moves can be performed indoors in a gym, outdoors in urban areas, on mountains or cliffs, outdoor boudlers, or on rock above water. They way the moves are applied is what makes climbing climibing. Since climbing is a movement based sport any movement can be incorporated into it and so practicing stuff like gymnastics and calisthenics becomes valuable and the different sports feed into eachother to encourage growth and progression. This is how I’m beggining to see everything. You can break down individual activites into their finest componenets but you can also uncompartmentalize your knowledge by drawing upon your knowledge of two different things to accomplish one task. That then creates a pathway in your brain establishing a relationship between the two knowledges. This can be repeated over and over as every skill you develop is tranferable in some way. My goal from here forward is to continue to develop my skills but also place myself in different sports, research areas, and environments to continue my growth as a person.
Last week I finished off talking about platueing and it is something everyone experiences in any field they are in. It is the feeling of lack of progression in comparison to the intial feelings of progression when they first started what it is they are doing. This happens all of the time in climbing because people are focused on grades. Grading is subjective and people tend to get sucked into the thought process of having to send the next grade to feel like they are doing better. This ends up becomming really toxic because people will use it to make others feel inferior or will think poorly of themselves if they complete a new grade but then get stuck at that level for a long period of time. The way I’ve tackled getting my atheletes to avoid the feeling of platueing is providing them a framework for how to visualize their progress. The objective is to go up grades but between each promotion they need to complete a large number of climbs that they are already climbing at. To do that they need to work on problems that are difficult for them. So then the goal isn’t to complete the whole climb it’s to complete a move on it. So we take the large scale progression adn break it down to its smallest component. Now every time they complete a move they couldn’t originally do they get the feeling of progression and that scales until eventually they are able to move up a grade.
Image generated with Bing ai photo generator. Prompt was to create an image of small steps making up larger steps.
This week I was coaching the junior league kids at my work I was focused on the kind of vocabulary I used when speaking to them. I avoided telling them directly what to do and instead asked them question to encourage metacognition. The questions I asked were along the lines of “Where di you fall” “Why do you think you fell” “What will you do next time”. I didn’t accept answer such as I wasn’t strong enough or I slipped. I wanted them to really think about how they positioned their bodies and if they didn’t know I’d have them do the climb again but have them pay attention to the different moves they are making. After doing it a second time they had way more to say and reflected more on what they were doing instead of avoiding thinking about their failures. This was extremely useful to get them reflecting but this type of thinking can very easily lead into the feeling of platueing. I will talk on how I’m tackling that next week.
Image generated with Bing ai generation. Prompt was create an image portraying the feeling of a platue. Tool accesible here
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
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 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.
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.
Climbing is something that is relatively new to me, but since I’ve started climbing it has quickly infiltrated every crevice of my mind. To me rock climbing isn’t about getting up to the top of a rock and then coming back down. It is a process that trains you to problem solve and fight your own ego. The rock climbing community is a very misunderstood group but we all generally have our own culminating cultish interpretation of the sport/art. Essentially, we see each mountain, cliff face, crag, and boulder as a teacher. This teacher presents us with a problem that will require the use of multiple tools in proper coordination in order to reach the conclusion. As climbers we utilize universal tools that we learn either intuitively through specific climbs that force those movements or through application in an indoor climbing gym. The real struggle is determining what order to apply these moves during a climb as even the smallest mistake will result in us failing and having to start over. This results in hours to days of practicing specific movements with micro adjustments until eventually it all comes together and we complete a climb. Now I understand that if you’ve never climbed before it seems unappealing to practice three movements hundreds of times in order to get on top of a rock thats only 12 feet tall but the philosophy climbers develop through climbing can be applied to everything in life, especially teaching. The most obvious universal practice acquired from climbing philosophy is that through continuous application eventually you will reach the conclusion of the problem you are facing. This is essential as a learner to be used to doing because learning tricky concepts can be challenging and require continuous application without any sign of progress. It is about trusting the process not abusing the process. Another useful lesson I’ve learned through climbing is that everyone is suited to solving specific kinds of problems. No two climbers are the same and some excel with certain movements, skills, wall angles and struggle with others. The same goes for learners as no two people will every have the same strengths and weaknesses. Climbing is something that has greatly shaped my pedagogy and forces me to humble and self motivate myself in order to overcome hardship. I hope that as this course progresses, and I reflect more on my rock climbing journey while relating it to teaching, I can further expand my understanding of what it means to be a good teacher.
The above image is of Will Bosi completing Burden of dreams a V17 boulder in Finland which is considered the hardest boulder in the world. He is the second person in the world to complete the route and it took him a number of years working on a replica indoors and 2 weeks on the actual rock to complete it. The photo is by Diego Borello from the article Will Bosi Sends ‘Burden of Dreams’ (V17) by Steven Potter. The boulder represents the pinnacle of climbing and completion of it absolves a climber of their burdens to continuously climb harder and harder climbs as there is nowhere in the world that has a boulder more difficult.
