Skiing, take 2

I went skiing again today. I seemed to remember much of what I learned about skiing from last week. But it seemed that there were more people out today, and so I had a few more issues trying to avoid people. For the most part I only wiped out trying to avoid people, which is good progress I guess.

So since this is an education blog, let's talk about education. According to behaviorism the way people learn is to give them stimuli to provoke a behavior, and then to reward them, and then to either (a) have them do a slightly more complex behavior, and reward them, and so on until you have them doing the target behavior (shaping), or (b) have them perform the next step in the overall task and reward them, and so on until they have performed all steps of the task successfully (chaining). Unfortunately that does not work so well at Beaver Mountain. Basically there is a tiny hill called Little Dogie that is not very steep at all, and then the next hill, Little Beaver, is very steep. So when I learned from Doug last week it was more or less behaviorism in action, at least initially. Doug showed me how to slow down, I practiced, and so on. Skinner would be proud. This week it was more learn by doing. I had to just go at little beaver and hope that I did not crash into anything and that I was learning along the way. And of course I fell a few times, but less than last week. But as Schank says, one must fail to learn. We'll see next time whether I learned anything this week, but I do feel a little more comfortable. I'm able to turn pretty well for the most part now. Slowing down when I am going super fast, not so much. But it went a lot better this week, and hopefully being able to slow down will come with time.