Bike Riding Teacher
6-13-2019
Recently I was paid to teach a 6 or 7 year old girl how to ride a bike…. Living in New York City can afford opportunities that one might not have traditionally so this is how it went down….
First, for all my friends and followers out there who have children and have children who they taught how to ride a bike … you probably know…it’s not that easy. Lucky for me the young lady had a lot of tenacity and really worked hard at it for like 2 hours… but dam… the kid got it! Room for improvement… yes… but she was able to pedal 20+ many times before wobbling off the pedals.
I was leading my 9am bicycle tour around Central Park as I do most mornings and we were at our last stop in Central Park at Strawberry Fields. Waiting and watching the bikes as my tour was in checking out the Imagine Mosaic, this man and little girl approached me and he asks me if I knew anyone who can help teach his kid how to ride a bike.
I didn’t know anyone who could teach his daughter, but certainly felt maybe I could help him. I asked him when he had in mind and he said today. He asked me how much I would charge and said I don’t know and asked him to name a price. It sounded reasonable, so we arranged a time and place to meet later in the day. The young lady was there and quite astute. I asked her a couple of questions and she professed a desire to eat candy and gave me a tic-tac. She seemed smart and old enough, so I agreed to do it.
In New York, some people have others do lots of things for them and some have other people do everything for them! They have nannies, dog walkers, food deliveries, house keepers, send out their laundry, drivers, trainers and apparently often find someone to help them do tasks they do not wish to take upon themselves. In this case the guy wanted someone to teach his kid how to ride a bike. He probably figured that he didn’t have the energy or physical ability to do it … and he was right, it is not easy and takes a bit of running around with the kid.
I’m not going to recount how I went about teaching her, but it did include a lot of running around, encouragements, pointing out successes and discussion on where we are going wrong. Good kid and very hard worker…. Really determined to get it right. Eventually she had enough of my coaching and it became a session of repeated practices, each time getting better and better.
By the time I left she was had made a friend who was helping her, and they were practicing. After 2 hours, covered in sweat, feeling we had made good progress I was dismissed.
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