My
father grew up sailing on the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland and took me with him
on all types of vessels as soon as I was able to tag along. My family have been
members of the East Greenwich Yacht Club since before I was born. It was always
a dream of my dad’s that I would grow up to love life on the water in the same
way that he does. When I was eight years old my parents signed me up for the
sailing camp run by EGYC. Granted, when I was eight I was much more interested
in swimming and being outside than learning how to properly tack and gibe a
boat, or how to make a safe docklanding. Be that as it may, by the age of eight
I was introduced to a whole new world of skills, gear, rigs, blades, hulls, and
terminology.
I think that I was inspired to keep up
with the evolving world of knowledge because of my dad’s passion for sailing
but also because of the instructors I had in my first few summers. They were
all college-aged kids and I literally thought that they were the coolest people
on the planet. I wanted to grow up and be just like them. I knew that they
sailed competitively and for fun outside of what they did for work, and I
wanted to be a part of that world someday. So, in order to make those dreams a
reality, I stuck with sailing at the camp, even when I was tempted to quit in
order to have a “normal” summer of guiltless spontaneity. When I was fourteen,
I was given the opportunity to Jr. Instruct classes, meaning I would help teach
the beginners while also still taking part in racing classes. Nine years, three
different yacht clubs, and numerous job titles later, I am the Program Manager
of the Jr. Sailing Program at Saunderstown Yacht Club.
Being literate in the discourse of
boating requires you to adopt a whole new vocabulary; we don’t even say “right”
or “left,” but “starboard” and “port.” I think that the biggest way that I
learned all these new words was to just use them and not be afraid of having to
be corrected. I also remember having to take a written test to prove my sailing
literacy before I was able to move on to higher level classes. As I moved from
learning general sailing skills to learning about racing tactics and
strategies, another new set of jargon was introduced to me- “laylines,” “black
flag,” “protest,” “penalty spin,” etc. I remember something that was helpful to
me was that at every club I sailed at there were lots of instructor-made
posters reminding me of the discourse- diagrams of the points of sail and parts
of boats, “Rules of the Road” posters, visual representations of race courses-
all of these things helped me feel more confident utilizing and discussing
sailing jargon, knowing that I could peek at them and “cheat” a little bit if I
was having a hard time getting an idea or question across.
As a future teacher, my sailing literacy
will benefit me in a few different ways. As a practical matter, I would be able
to coach the sailing team of a school I may work at (if they have a team), and
during my summers off I hope to continue to serve as Program Manager at a
sailing center. But beyond job and work realities, I think that my experience
of learning, and continuing to learn, about sailing will influence how I teach
the discourses of the social sciences. My instructors always did a really good
job of surrounding us in the language of sailing and helping us understand it
to the point where we could comfortably use it ourselves. As a future teacher,
I hope to tackle the language of History with my students in a way that is
seamless and even blended into the rest of my instruction. Instead of having a “vocabulary
day,” I hope to blend that aspect of learning into the rest of the content to
that it makes better sense, instead of removing the important language from the
content, erasing its meaning.
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