Teaching Instinct

The sailing season is wrapping up right now.  We're taking masts down and pulling boats out of the water and getting ready to haul the docks. 

I've learned a ton in my first season of coaching.  I'll be much better my second season, I think.  One of the things I've realized (and it feels like a big "Duh!" realization) is that teaching sailing is really about teaching instincts.  There's a lot of technical information that sailors can learn with their brains, but the hard and mysterious and beautiful part of sailboat racing is instinct and feel.  It's stuff that's hard to articulate or draw out on a chalkboard.  And you can do some of that with lectures and handouts and instructions through a megaphone, but the intellectual road ends and you have to get out and proceed on foot down a narrow path and through a thicket to get to the place where you really feel and know and understand what you need to do in a sailboat. 

So how do you teach instinct and feel?  I think the answer is that you set up structured situations and you repeat them a lot of times.  Rolling start drills, for example.  Or downwind starts to a short leeward leg so everyone gets to the leeward mark at the same time.  We did that one again and again on Tuesday, in puffy breeze, so the sailors had very little time to think.  They just had to respond and make quick decisions at a crowded mark rounding.  And then they were back at the starting line to do it again and try it a different way. 

My job is to set up situations where instincts can get better.  Set up drills where repetition leads to confidence and quickness, so their brains don't interrupt them or slow them down when they encounter something in the middle of a race.  Isolate a situation, repeat it with variations, then a short lecture or handout talking about options so they have a context and some experience to draw upon.  Vary that with longer stretches -- a long upwind paired boatspeed drill, where well-matched pairs go against one another to test straight line speed -- and very physical drills: 720s, tacks, gybes, stopping and starting the boats until the sailors are tired and sick of me.  Then back to the situations: a last beat team race drill, a series of starts with different challenges, the leeward mark rounding drill.

Comments

[Bill Altreuter]

I am coming to the belief that drills are the best way to teach most things.

[David]

It's interesting that you see it this way. There are a lot of people who would tell you that that is the whole point of teaching, to elicit certain reactions to particular stimulus. The result of this, I would hazard, is what we end up calling 'skills'. Talent is the ability to render multiple skills and successfully resolve and respond to an unstructured stimulus.

[MT]

I think there's also such a thing as a talent for learning, which I lack. You have to be at least somewhat comfortable with your own incompetence as you go through the drills. I'm not sure I've ever learned anything that I have had to sincerely do all the drills to learn. I'll skip ahead by natural aptitude or I'll skip out. Naturally, I blame my parents.