The End of Swim Lessons and a lot of Progress
pamelamyers | August 19, 2016
Sam had her last swim lesson about a week ago — her 12th. She was making such good progress after the first group of six that we decided to go on and do another six, and to schedule them as quickly as possible. She had six swim lessons in about a week. Sam made such tremendous progress over where she was when she started, but I think she was burning out on lessons. By the 11th, she was very unwilling to do things, wasn’t making progress, and seemed a little stressed out about the whole thing. It was a disastrous lesson! The 12th went better, but I could tell she was done done done. Over all, we are happy though. She can swim a bit, she has lost all fear of going under water, she can tread water, and can sort of float. We took her to the pool a few times since the last lesson to help her practice, but she didn’t want to do much. I really think she just is tired of learning. She kept telling me she just wanted to have fun. And she should. Like Mark said, we can’t take the fun out of it for her or she will never really learn to swim. We had hoped she would pass the “deep water test” at our pool this summer, but she can’t swim well enough for that yet. I don’t think she was that concerned about it. I have stopped bugging her about how well she is or is not swimming at this point and am just letting her enjoy the rest of the summer. Today at the pool, there was a little boy taking the test and my mom and I told her we should watch him. He swam the length of the pool and treaded, etc. just fine. I made a few comments, but nothing to pressure her and Sam said, sort of out of the blue, “I think I can pass it next year.” I was pretty happy to hear it. At least I know she still wants to swim for real. We’ll see next year! In the meantime, I’ll take her to the gym and let her keep up her skills in the pool there. Hey, hanging out in an 87 degree heated indoor pool is not a bad thing to do in the cold, cold, Pennsylvania winter!