It's not the consumers' job to know what they want

If that's the case, then Bode screwed the pup when he decided to ski JN's on K2 4's. Didn't read the whole 16+ pages of the last thread that dragged on for a year, but I'll say this: For years carving was the pinnacle of technical achievement on skis. Sure, it takes mastery of balance, rotary, edging, and pressure... etc.... These days, it's but one valuable tool in the kit as the sport has broadened in scope and expectation. Should it be taught? Sure, not as THE 'destination', but as a point along the road of one's bag of tricks.

 

Student centered learning wrong? No. Jobs was very much on the student centered side of the equation. He saw the larger narrative... the whole mountain if you will, not just the groomer of the OS-land, and thought through product accordingly. He guided the market toward a diversity with clear operating principles where others tried and continue to force consumer conformity. Good instructors follow the former, dogmatic ones who only understand a narrow range of the mountain and glissading experience subscribe religiously to the latter. No one's doing to go jibbing on GS stock race skis, and conversely, no one is going to do a downhill on even the burliest fat ski. There's more to do on skis these days, so more tools and techniques are relevant. Ok, that's all. 

I'm okay with that, with a caveat, which is that maybe carving is required tool number 1 in the kit. And the only reason I say that is that carving helps you control your skis and your path down the hill, versus skidding, or not carving, or whatever you want to call the alternative. When you're driving your car, you don't think "Gee...do I want to make my car track around the next curve...or do I want to let it do its thing and skid all over the place."

 

It's almost like, in addition to requiring ski brakes or retention devices for snowboards, there also ought to be a requirement that you can control whatever it is you happen to be riding that day. That's a personal thing for me, because a couple of years back, standing off by the side of the trail (Schoolmarm at Keystone...Yeah, I know, what was I thinking?) and an out of control snowboarder took me out, resulting in a concussion and broken collarbone. Today's twin-tippers are almost worse, because they're heavily into going backwards, and I haven't seen one yet that could control his or her skis. Of course, there's attitude, too.  As in, there are people who can carve, but they don't mind doing it over the back of your skis, or your face, or whatever else happens to be handy ("Hey!  You were on my line!").

 

But you get the joke. No question, carving ain't the only game in town, but I sure think of it as a prereq to skiing with a crowd...

 

 

 

I'm so pleased you started this! I've not dared express before my skepticism about expecting students to know what they should be taught, especially young beginners, for fear of suffering the fate that befell Salman Rushdie when he published "The Satanic Verses". After all, it's dangerous to poke at religious icons. Perhaps I can escape the fatwa though - or at least deflect it onto Nolo, the heretic.

 

I began learning to ski when I was six or so under the tutelage of a large, blonde Austrian woman in Kitzbuehel and spent every December and January for several seasons climbing the junior ladder there. Her view seemed to be that students' parents were paying for them to learn to ski and learn they would! There was a defined progression and you didn't progress to the next steps, which built on former ones, until you had mastered them. Then you got a little badge (levels 1 through 5, each a different colour...hmm, where have I seen that since?) that was certainly well earned and worn with great pride. I loved it, but perhaps others didn't...they did actually learn to ski though.

 

 

Consider Jobs' frame of reference.  He single-handedly changed how people listen to music and buy music.  Prior to the iPod there were those wretchedly clunkly tape and CD players which, no matter how much you spent on one, would skip if you used one when running.  Nobody really liked them, but nobody had any idea there could be something different and better.  Who needed an iPad before it was introduced?  Once those things were introduced, Apple did pay attention to what the market wanted, but in the beginning nobody knew they wanted one when it didn't yet exist.

The interesting thing here is that carving is the natural thing for a car, motorcycle, or to a lesser extent a modern frontside carver to do.  Controlled skidding is a much harder thing to do, but opens up a much wider range of possibilities, be it in racing or in 3d snow.  In rough order, skidding is hardest on a motorcycle on asphalt and easiest on skis, but still these days a higher-level skill to do well. 

 

In terms of student-centeredness, I'm sympathetic to HardDay's point as it relates to group lessons.  But, in reality most instructors do have sort of a default setting for group lessons with several competing but vague agendas. 

 

Racing, maybe specialty camps, and the more delusional than average student are the only cases I can think of where being student-centered would be way off, though.  For racing and camps the athlete/student sort of voted by choosing the experience, and in the case of the delusional sometimes the best service is to show someone reality.

 

 

 

 

Guest-centered instruction involves more than producing a lesson to meet what the student "wants". We ask for their goals in taking a lesson, not specifically what they "want". We ask for other information about them and their experiences to help determine what they really need to discover about skiin. We try to find ways to relate useful new materials to what they already know.

Yep, okay.  There are two things here:

 

- Carving versus the other stuff.  You talk abut "controlled skidding".  That's kind of an oxymoron.  I'd prefer to talk about what I *think* you're discussing as something like "steering"...but that doesn't quite get it, so somebody help me out.  If you want to look at polar opposites, maybe "carving" and "skidding" are the opposite ends of the spectrum, and, yes, there's a ton of stuff in between, a lot of it good.  Pivoting a flat ski can control your speed, and, as LeMaster points out, there's almost never a "pure" carved turn.  You have to steer the ski to what he calls "the initial steering angle" before you can get the on-raills thing to start happening.  So whatever we're doing to control speed and point the skis where we want to go is a Good Thing.

 

- "Student centered", I'm L3 alpine cert but have been coaching racers, and it's been many years since I taught skiing in a ski school.  Yep, ya gotta be student centered, so if somebody hands me a $1000 and wants to know how to ski backwards, Ill probably show him or her.  But I'm also going to let the student know what the rules of the road are, and what my student has to to to do his or her thing and not endanger the rest of the paying customers...

 

 

 

Jobs had it right.  In order for student directed instruction to work, the student has to have enough knowledge and experience to actually be able to formulate realistic goals and develop a reasonable expectation of what they expect to get out of a lesson.  Yet the vast majority of would be students have little to no actual understanding of how skiing works combined with a skewed perception of their abilities and knowledge.  How could someone who has no clue how to even use a ski be expected to contribute in a meaningful way to a ski lesson? 

 

In upper level lessons, you invariably get people who sound like they are saying the right things; i.e. you get somebody who, because they can "ski" a double black diamond and who has all the latest gear, will ask to work on some specific area of skiing like bumps or steeps or something.  So the instructor takes them at their word so they can be "student directed."  The only problem is the complete disconnect between the student's perception of their skiing and what they really want (which is unstated, but is the real reason they are shelling out ridiculous amounts of money on a lesson--they actually want to learn how to ski well).  So the student thinks, "well, I can get down anything, so I must be really, really close to becoming the kind of skier I really want to be, and if I just take a few lessons, that will push me over the hump."  The only problem is, that isn't the case because the student doesn't actually know how to ski and just happens to be athletic and aggressive.  What they need is for the instructor to point out that instead of spending the day working on bump technique, they should spend the day actually learning how to ski.  Instead, the instructor hears "I want to work on my bump skiing" so the day is wasted putting lipstick on a pig, nothing is really accomplished and the student is left wondering why they just can never seem to get better.  Even worse, since they were allowed to focus on bumps for their lesson, they will assume that their current technique must be generally fine (if just missing that *something*) and they will keep on with the same bad movements that will hold them back forever.

 

Really, unless you are dealing with somebody you are regularly working with, you can throw SDSI out the window because anybody for whom SDSI would actually apply wouldn't be getting piece-meal instruction from some random ski instructor.  Those people understand how both skiing and ski instruction work and as such, they would be training with a dedicated coach or a set of coaches. 

 

Now granted, not everyone who signs up for a ski lesson is actually interested in learning how to ski, but regardless, as ski instructors I believe you are obligated to make that assumption.  That means giving every student a candid opinion of their skiing ability.  That means making sure no student leaves a lesson without understanding how skiing works and how to develop skiing ability.  Finally, it means working with the student to develop a realistic plan for the lesson, not just blindly agreeing to whatever messed up thing they think they need to work on.  Video can be super helpful in that regard--once students can actually see how bad they look they are typically going to be far more receptive if the plan needs to be modified. 

 

Or not.  Maybe you get somebody like Highway Star who looks at their footage and is totally happy.  That's fine.  But at that point, you know both you and the student are dealing with the same reality (or lack thereof).  That actually really says all that needs to be said about guest centered, student directed ski instruction.  It works best with somebody like Highway Star.  So Highway Star or Steve Jobs?  I'm not a huge Steve Jobs fan, but in this case, the choice seems obvious to me.

There are lots of ways to get a shaped turn without leaving a rut.  You can drift the whole turn, smear the top of the turn, hit a bit of edge at the bottom, intentionally overpressure your shovel to lose your tails, or intentionally smear your shovel and then rail on your tails.  Whether this is desirable or controlled depends.  To put it in context, most strong intermediates can be taught to get their hips close to the snow in forgiving conditions while carving on frontside carvers, but don't have the edge control to do what I just listed.  Some of what I just listed has what some might call a significant steering component, some doesn't.  Everything listed does involve some skid.

 

Interestingly, one of the transitions racers need to make if they shift their focus to freeriding is more of an emphasis on these skills and a bit less on carving wherever possible. 

 

However, if someone who occasionally carves a portion of a turn on an open green wants to learn to ski "double blacks," yes, helping them skid more at that level isn't doing them a favor.  While you may not be into twintips, carving (but not at a very high edge angle) even plays an important role in the park, so it is important at different ends of the student spectrum.

 

 

 

Yes Jobs is right.  The student's only job is to learn.  The teacher's job is to provide them with new information they possibly didn't even know they didn't know.

 

 That being said, The SDSI approach can be used to acquire data points which will help the teacher formulate not only the right things to teach, but how to go about teaching it.  If a student is very focused on a particular skill and really wants to direct the lesson, then fine, go with it, give them what they want.  However, ultimately it is still OUR responsibility as teachers to facilitate that interaction and convert that into a useful ski lesson.  And I would dare say that if we started observing and hearing mis information coming from the mouth of the student, then it is OUR job to tactfully and careful try to pry open the mind of that student to see things another way.  If you don't do that, then you are doing the student a disservice.  

Jobs was phenomenal at marketing to people who needed to be told what they wanted. Moreover, his audience wasn't highly skilled IT workers. His audience was the general public, who want simple, no-thought-necessary solutions.

 

 

 

A body of knowledge can be divided into three parts for any individual: 

 

The stuff you know

The stuff you don't know

The stuff you don't know that you don't know (ie you don't even know of its existence)

 

As people become more skilled/knowledgeable/aware, they learn more stuff, and can recognize the existence of more topics that they previously were unaware of. 

 

When I was a never-ever skier, I would have been stymied if someone asked what I wanted to work on. And that was to be expected. As an experienced skier aware of my own skills and weaknesses, I expect to always be asked what I want to work on.

 

So it's fair to say that it's not consumer's job to know what they want, particularly for a novice consumer. However, it's a requirement that a good producer fill the needs of the consumers who do know what they want. 

Huh.  Re SDSI, it's kind of interesting, because I dunno if we're talking about a model of what teaching skiing *ought* to be or what it currently is.  As I said, it's been some time since I taught in a ski school, so I genuinely don't know which we're talking about here. When I was teaching, it was kind of an admixture...I'd get a bunch of students or classes who were at level x, and  their opening move was that they wanted to get better so they could get to level y. Fine, I can do that.  Then I'd get other folks who "wanted to ski better so I can ski with my husband" or "look better while skiing under the chairlift."  So...again, I dunno.  I don't know what students want from instructors these days, so you'll have to tell me.  Then, I guess, the next question is, Do we give them what they want (Or what they think the want, or what they say they want?) or do we teach them how to ski?  Assuming that "what they want" and "learning to ski" are two different things, which doesn't have to be the case.

 

Ski racers are no different than any other skiers, but in general, they're a little more one-pointed. As in, "I want to get to the finish line faster", and most of them know that carving turns is the way to go. Once again, however, per LeMaster, we rarely see pure carved turns, just some that are more carved than others. It was interesting watching the Soelden races on U Sports,  Steve Porino talked about how Ted Ligety said he thought winning came from carving more of the turn than the other racers (as in, 75% as opposed to 70%, or something like that).

 

As just another thought to make everyone start throwing darts at each other, I maintain that carved turns are not exclusive to race courses or hard snow. I know that rockered skis are all the rage right now, and I'm looking forward to trying them.  But most of the time, I ski powder on a pair of 165 SLs, which have a big, fat tip, plenty of sidecut, and seem to carve turns in powder just fine...

 

I've been thinking about this some more. It's not so much that SDSI is right, wrong, or indifferent, what Jobs was saying, I believe was greater than that. "It's not the consumer's job to know what they want" can be read a lot of different ways. If you limit it to "what they want right now" that can be a far different  thing from "what they're going to want 12 months from now." The guy who ran Sony was the same kind of visionary. Nobody believed there was any kind of market for the initial Walk-Man, but this guy felt like even though the average Joe on the street didn't know that he wanted to be cruising around with his own personal jukebox in his ear, he'd want something like that some time soonk, and if Sony built it, they would come.  And they did. 

 

So take it back to ski teaching. Okay, for whatever reason, maybe the carved turn is what the skiing public wanted, or thought they wanted, 20 years ago, and who knows what they want now...but the more interesting question is, What are they going to want next? This sport is supposed to be exciting, right?  And I don't blame perspective students for thinking that the same old lame happy jive of left/right, carved or maybe skidded turn, repeat ad nauseum is, in fact, pretty nauseous.  So what new stuff can we dream up next to engage our students in 2014, say? The interesting thing is, if you look outside the confines of your average ski school, there's all kinds of futuristic stuff happening that nobody could have predicted even 5 years ago...ski domes in the desert, para sailers on skis, mono ski clubs in Chamonix, people climbing up and skiing peaks in the Himalayas...you name it, and it's either happening or is about to. So to an extent, if you want to not just give tomorrow's students what they might want after they learn how to turn them left and right, by whatever means, but give them a thrill they never knew existed and change the game, per Steve Jobs, then you probably need to start thinking outside the box that says "Carved or not? And if not, why not?"

 

As I say, these days I'm pretty much outside the day to day ski teaching profession, so it's not my call.  It's up to you folks who are still doing it.  I will say one thing, however, which is back when I was teaching skiing and watching the PSIA model evolve, making good carved turns wasn't a goal, but a means to an end. Learning to run gates might have been a goal in itself, but it was also a tool, a means to an end. That eventual goal was to be an all-mountain skier..."Any mountain, any conditions, any time."  Remember that one? For me, constantly chiseling away on that tool paid a lot of benefits. I've raced downhill at 70 mph, skied from Switzerland to Italy, done The Ridge at Taos, skied the Mine Dumps on Loveland Pass and the Winter Park side chutes off Berthoud Pass...after a Master's race. Even though there's more to come, and maybe that includes para-skiing or whatever, the experiences I've had on skis have been the greatest...but they've all occurred because I did my school figures first.

 

So let's forget about our students for a moment and swing the focus back to us, the educators.  What is our motivation? I've drifted over into coaching ski racers, and it suits me right down to the ground. Why did I stop teaching skiing? Well, a couple of reasons were obvious: (1) I was a full-certified professional, but I was going broke, and I didn't see anything inside the ski teaching profession that was likely to change that, and (2) My own skiing had totally plateaued, most likely because I wasn't skiing all that much.  But reason #3 was more emphemeral, which was that I didn't feel like I was making a difference. Sure, I had some students who's skiing really went places, and I'm not even going to pretend that I was the the cause ("Our students succeed in spite of us"...remember that one),  But overall, I just didn't feel like I, or me combined with all of my colleagues in the ski teaching profession, were making any kind of a difference that you'd notice. 

 

I remember one day, I think in my 3rd year of teaching at Breckenridge, I had an afternoon off and was heading up to the B-50 for some quality time in the Back Bowls. Under the #2 chair, I saw carnage that I didn't think was possible...skiers pivoting their skis left and right and never changing direction...feet locked together, always in the back seat...running over each others' skis...crashing and blowing out of skis in the bumps like trout ejecting from a dynamited pond...and two ski patrol toboggans, headed for the clinic. And I remember thinking You know what? This is not only ugly, it's really unsafe. We are not making a dent in this situation, and so I'm getting out of this routine...
 

Not a very enlightened position, probably, but there it is. I have to tell you that I find skiing a pretty scary proposition these days. When people find out I'm a Masters racer, they invariable say "Really? That ski racing is really dangerous stuff!" To which I say "Not really...skiing with the public is what's hazardous to your health, these days." I got beaned by a boarder at Keystone some years back, result, broken collarbone and a concussion.  So if I'm outside a race course, my head is always on a swivel. I've been free skiing with some of my Masters buddies at Loveland to get ready for early season race training, and it's like a Saturday night demolition derby. As one of my friends said last weekend, "Boy, I can't wait until we start running gates."

 

So I don't know where that rant came from, and it's time for me to pull over and let somebody else drive. I guess my final thoughts are these: (1) Yep, let's be visionaries and figure out what the snow sports public wants next and give it to them. If it's ski flying on mood elevators, fine...I think we have the background for that challenge. But (2) please, if these folks are going to do whatever they are going to do in the same arena as the rest of us, dammit, let's teach them to carve or otherwise control their passage through this vale of tears...

 

 

 

I didnt need an ipad before they were invented, i still dont need one now. In fact, no one needs an ipad, now or then. There are few things i hate more than advertising that presumes to tell me what i want or need. And thats why ive never liked steve jobs or apple. 

 

More on topic, the same applies to instructing. No student wants to be told that they MUST learn this or that technique. A good instructor will make their student aware of what is possible on skis, and teach according the student's desired outcome. If you want to learn to carve, great. If you want to learn to do a 360, i can teach you that too. Bumps, powder, a really awesome snowplow, its all good. Personally, i'd always recommend working on a bit of everything and being a well rounded skier, but if a paying customer disagrees, who am i to say they're wrong?

 

 

Your two posts are interesting in that 15 years ago they would have anticipated a lot of what was coming in terms of skiing technique and ski design, both for 3d snow and also for racing.  "Real" race skis haven't been designed as super-carvers for some time, though they are still obviously designed for very firm snow...I can't insert links it seems right now, but the thread on early rise for race skis bears this out. 

 

As a casual observation, it's also interesting to me that there's still a lot of focus on ski camber and transition zone shape, though those changes have been obvious for some time, but less on things like subtle in sidecut, which to me are often equally important and do also tie back into what works for technique.

 

Also think to what you do if you, say after a Master's race, encounter a well-groomed halfpipe.  Do you drop in?  Likely so, and while edging is very important in there, carving in the modern sense of the word isn't, but the skillset you have from racing probably does ok in there.  People with a primary focus on carving blue groomers, by contrast, can't, just as they can experience trying to ski freeride terrain and finding that with their primary focus on round turns on frontside carvers they can't.  The school figures you've already learned probably were more diverse in some ways. 

 

If it wasn't for Steve Jobs we'd still be using serial ports for our keyboards and mice (pc's had USB before Macs, but also had serial ports - no one used USB until Jobs removed the choice.)

If it wasn't for Steve Jobs we'd still be using Floppy Discs (again he removed them.)

If it wasn't for Steve Jobs we'd still be manufacturing and shipping music (and software) on plastic discs.

It's not about the iPad, it's about him saying "I'm not asking the consumer whether they want me to keep the Floppy Discs in their computers. They'll say 'yes, give us a choice.'"

Jobs forced the future in many ways. Not including Flash in iPhones (and iPads) was a hugely risky thing. But guess what, it forced the development of HTML 5.

What it's about is vision and determination, rather then Market Research.

I don't think it's a direct parallel to Student Focused Teaching. The reason for that is that most students only take a lesson once in a while. You can't take someone who won't be back for another lesson soon - and start them with the basics. They'll be dissatisfied, complain and tell others not to take lessons. You have to make them think they got their money's worth - frustrating and somewhat sad, but it's too expensive for most people to take a lot of lessons.

Race coaches can do better because the students are there for a series of lessons.

Nolo, apples to oranges...

Services and I mean all services start with the same simple question, how may I help you?. It doesn't involve a gadget, or hardware beyond wanting to know how to use it better after the lesson. Jobs was a innovator and helped bring new toys to market and in that context his comments make sense. But take that idea and apply it to say a restaurant, do you walk in and ask the waitstaff to tell you what you want to eat? Even in a fast food restaurant you have more than one choice. Do you go to the doctor without a reason? Do they ask about symptoms and complaints? If you refuse to tell them anything and just say make me feel better how would that play out? Discovering needs and expectations and avoiding the one size fits all approach is a key to serving the needs of a customer. That's all student centered means.

Steve was right.  It is unreasonable to expect the student to know what they want.  That doesn't mean they don't want what they want, nor does it mean you can tell them they want something they don't.  It is YOUR JOB to figure out what they want and give it to them.  That is GOOD marketing.

 

If you will pardon the intrusion from a non-instructor, whose anecdotal evidence is likely an outlier, and maybe not significant, let me share some student experience.   When I took my first lesson, I had been skiing for a couple of decades.  Even with my experience, I didn't know what I wanted from the lesson, so why did I take it?   Curiosity.  I had just knocked myself out due to a tactical error, was feeling just a little woozy and very uncharacteristically  decided to stop pushing it too far and take it easy for the rest of the day.  I thought, "I may as well take a lesson, since I'm not up to full speed ahead damn the torpedoes skiing."  If I didn't know what I wanted after skiing for decades, how can you expect a someone with a few days on snow to know what they want?

 

The lesson was good.  I learned a few fun drills, that I could see would be of benefit to me, and I believe it improved my skiing.  For my 2nd lesson, as I told the instructor, I still didn't know what I wanted, but the first one turned out ok, so I thought I would let the instructor decide.  He followed me on a run down the hill, and mentioned that I didn't seem to have any ability to control my speed (I had to stop and wait for him several times).  My reply was, "Why would I want to do that, if I need to slow down I can put on the brakes?  Show me how to ski faster, not slower."  He rightfully explained (paraphrasing) how it was more stylish and showed better technique to ski smoothly with seemingly effortless subtle speed control than alternating between schussing and slamming on the brakes.  I now fully agree, and have added that ability to my repertoire, but at the time I had no desire to learn how to ski slowly.  The instructor did his job, and correctly figured out what I wanted (with some help from me), and showed my how to carve better turns, loosing less energy and skiing even faster, which was what I truly enjoyed.

 

Which brings me to another sub-plot in this thread.  I hate to hijack this thread when there are already several with the same topic, but I didn't introduce it to the thread, and I must clear up the apparent misconception.   Good carving as a skill and goal does not mean carving blue groomers.  the very fact that it is seen by some as something to be done only on groomers, and blue groomers at that only illustrates how difficult a goal good clean no-energy-lost carving can be.  It means working on developing the best carved turn you can make everywhere.  It may not be "the destination", but it is a goal someone can still work on after decades and thousands of days on snow,  on all kinds of snow, on trials marked black, double blacks, cliff area, and off the map, doing your best to carve your best everywhere you can,  compromising when you have to, but trying to reduce the amount and places you have to compromise.  If you think that smearing and drifting turns is a skill that supersedes carving, you need to think again.  

 

Of course if you get obsessed with one goal, your other skills will laps, but eventually you will WANT to get around to them.  Doing what you want makes you happy now.  Doing what will help you do what you want at some point in the future will make you happy then.  You have to balance current wants and desires with future considerations to maximize total happiness.  Your students want to do this too. You (and they), can't sacrifice it all for tomorrow, or you won't get there.

This is where being student-centered can run into problems: as one example, if the student doesn't understand the limitations of different techniques, such as solely carving. 

 

Certainly you can carve in powder, as SkiRacer55 noted already.  If you are really good, you can carve legit black runs when they are firm and smooth, but you will be travelling pretty quickly if it is your sole method of speed control and you will be incredibly limited, even dangerous, if it is your only method of controlling speed and line.  There are blue runs, particularly at small areas in the east, that are rated black or even "double black," mainly for marketing reasons, but people can get in trouble if they think that the ability to carve these means that they can head to, say, Jackson, and ONLY carve there.

 

Certainly ski racers also don't try to carve beautiful, deep ruts as a goal of itself, either, because it's a lot slower that using your edges a bit less and often not possible either.

 

Hence the sometimes funny phenomenon of people doing things like going to a real mountain and complaining that the ski school didn't taking them down to mellow groomers to better work on their carving, when they signed up for a steeps lesson.

 

In that case, if the student wanted to learn to ski steeps, but had bought the idea that they could do this solely by carving, there's a tough choice:  blow smoke with the student, or give them real instruction.  If the student shows up and says, Today, I want to solely work on Eurocarving some of your groomers, then that's a different story and obviously if they pay for a private they can do that.  Of course, where you take someone for that type of lesson would be a mellow blue, maybe even a green run with some room to roam. 

 

Before someone posts a picture of a racer carving injected snow to rebut this, most race courses are less steep than you think, have elaborate safety precautions, and aren't open to the public.  And yes, very good skiers can carve there, if someone wants to work on carving in that context there are abundant race programs for them.  An icy headwall on an open run is different, and being able to carve buff corduroy also is different.

 

Edited by CTKook - 11/4/11 at 6:24am

 

Actually my wife and I do this almost every time we go out to dinner.  We ask the waitstaff to ask the chef to serve us whatever he/she is most proud of or would order themselves.  No need to tell us what it is until you bring it to the table,

 

Off topic but we do this very regularly.......

 

now back to your regularly scheduled programming....

 

Well, Jobs was a genius at finding things that the public needed/would love to use before we even knew that we wanted this stuff.  I can't say this about most of the other computer people that I have run across or have talked to.  If all of the ski instructors in the world were as genius as Jobs, then I would say, definitely yes, the student has no business making requests about what he/she wants to learn.  The problem arises when a less than genius person alienates the student this is being taught by not ending up giving them what they truly need and/or leaving them feeling like they were taught according to an agenda that was determined by the ski school, etc.  The gifted ski instructors that I have had in recent years have asked me what my goals were and then taught what I really needed to get there -- I was left feeling that I was being listened to and then given a glimpse of the bigger picture of how to learn to ski.

 

The analogy that comes to mind is how I deal with cats in my animal hospital -- long ago, I discovered that the trick to handling examining feline patients was to convince them that they want me to do the things that I need to do to get the examination done.

Well, you are ostensibly the expert and educator and if they are, in fact, wrong...? Who else is going to say it?

 

As an aside, I don't know what the carving vs steering/skidding debate has to do with the question. I doubt anyone (however misguided) shows up for a lesson to learn how to push out their ski tails into a hacker's skid. An experienced instructor might recognize that a more advanced skier, capable of arcing a carve in some situations, has not yet developed the refined control of his edges that would enable him to ski more challenging terrain - that skier probably doesn't recognize it himself. That's the point. 

 

 That's the sort of student-centred approach that might just work.

 

OT section:

 

 

Unlikely, but possible.  Many PCs still have a PS/2 keyboard and mouse port.  (That's probably what you mean by "serial", since I haven't seen a true serial port keyboard on a PC in a long time.)  When you're the only hardware vendor for a platform you can make arbitrary decisions like that.

 

 

Unlikely, but they might have died a slower, more lingering death.  This had more to do with flash storage getting reasonably cheap and Apple wanting to save a few bucks.

 

 

Apple did not invent the MP3 player, though forcing everyone with an iPhone to use iTunes may have sped up adoption of online music purchases.  It also gave them a huge captive market, so this wasn't exactly altruistic.

 

 

Which is great... except when they make arbitrary decisions about things where they really should give you a choice.

 

e.g. earlier this year they shipped a new version of Final Cut Pro that was not backwards-compatible with the old version's files, didn't support all the hardware the old version did, and worked totally differently -- and also stopped selling and supporting the old version at the same time.  For your average joe who wants to cut together some home movies from their camcorder it's not that big a deal, but it's a nightmare for a company that has sunk big money into an editing pipeline.  If you upgrade you may have to replace lots of hardware, change your processes, and redo thousands of hours of work, and if you don't then you don't get support or upgrades from Apple and it becomes a pain to even do things like add a new workstation (since now you have to scrounge around to find licenses for the old version).

 

 

Well, when the iPhone launched there really wasn't any mobile browser that could run Flash -- most could barely render a lot of web pages.  But steadfastly refusing to let Adobe make it work is less 'risky' and more Apple trying to lock down their mobile ecosystem with an iron fist.  They get 30% (at least) of everything sold in the App Store -- but nothing if Adobe gives away Flash support and you can just go to a website full of flash games...

 

Apple's done a lot of good things.  The "we're going to tell you what you want and you'll like it" attitude is, IMO, not one of them.  (It works okay for consumer electronics, but when you start building general-purpose computers like that it doesn't work well for power users.)  It's part of why they still haven't made a lot of inroads in the business market.

 

Ski instruction section:

 

That sounds pretty good to me!  I hope someone says that about (some of) my lessons.  Someday.

 

 

I'll have to remember that one.  Sometimes I feel like I'm herding cats out there... :-)

 

Jobs wasn't interested in teaching - he was a marketer! I'm not sure why we're applying a marketing model to teaching. Most of apple is based on hype and simplification (to the point of making certain products less useful, like Final Cut Pro), and locking products together. Apple is about marketing; it's not about growing and developing users.

 

I'm sure anyone who took an iLesson would be convinced that everything they learned "just works" and it's the best experience they've ever had, regardless of the actual content. It'd be glossy or shiny and at most a three step process. 

 

Marketing and teaching are different domains.

Hey Matthias, good points all. I'm by no means saying that I don't have issues with many things that Apple does - just pointing out that he had the chutzpah to do what he thought was right and to not rely on asking his customers what THEY thought was right. Trying to explain the thread title quote in his context.

Now to say that this approach would work for someone else is not true. He had the ability to be right more often then not, most of us don't. Kind of like another quarterback thinking the no-huddle offense would work for them because it works for Tom Brady. It wouldn't necessarily.

"It's not the consumers' job to know what they want"

 

Good discussion but then again maybe it depends on who is saying it. I remember long ago in my corporate life hearing a senior designer at GM say , when they first showed the not long lamented last generation Caprice to the internal sales staff and the murmurs of disbelief started to arise, "I'll tell the public what good design is". Wonder if he's working a a Mickey D's on 8 mile Rd now?

Anyone know the context of this quote?

 

fom