I’ve talked before about getting my archery instructor qualification and before the end of the month I’ll tell you all about the climbing instructor training but for now, I’m going to tell you what it’s like to actually teaching archery sessions with a group of teenagers.
The teenagers in question were my current Rangers, aged between fourteen and twenty-five. They’d only done archery at Sparkle & Ice very shortly before the session I’d had booked in for several weeks so I didn’t need to go over the safety talk too strictly, they already knew it. Don’t point the arrows at anything except the targets or the floor, don’t cross the shooting line until I say so, stop if I say stop etc. All fresh in their minds, plus most of it is just plain common sense to a reasonably-behaved teenager. We already knew which bows they should be using – three right-eyed, one left-eyed. They’d been through how to nock an arrow, how to pull the string, how to retrieve arrows.
And so it was my job to make half-decent archers out of them. We didn’t have to waste twenty minutes with me individually supervising their first arrows, we could get straight to business.
Straight to business means aim at the gold and shoot six arrows so I can get an idea of how you’re shooting. I tried to correct some arms and elbows but that mostly made things worse so eventually I let it go. The results were adequate and I’m not looking to make Olympic archers of them. I’m looking for them to have fun and not kill or maim anyone.
Once I’d seen where they were hitting the target, I could correct their aim. A Ranger who’s consistently hitting the top left corner while aiming at the gold needs to learn to aim at about five o’clock in the boundary between black and white, for example. My oldest Ranger has done archery almost as many times as I have and groups her arrows in a big circle around the gold. There’s not much I can do with that apart from leave her to practice.
But my youngest Ranger? 80% of her arrows weren’t even hitting the target. I watched her. I watched her shooting standing backwards. I tried correcting her but it seemed that it felt unnatural to shoot that way round. So I tried swapping her bow, giving her a right-eyed one. If that felt comfortable, she could carry on with it, otherwise we’d go back to the left-eyed and work a bit harder. And you know what? She transformed. She went from missing 80% of the time to hitting 80% of the time. I’ve never seen anything like it.
Target practice is boring so we played games. An old favourite is Rescue the Princess, where you have to cross the vast expanse of ice (hit the white), cross the lava field (hit the black), swim the ocean (hit the blue), fight your way through the flames (hit the red) and then scale the tower to rescue the princess (hit the gold), in that order. It forces them to focus on their aim without teaching them to specifically and constantly aim at one single point. It’s also more varied than merely “hit the gold hit the gold hit the gold” and therefore more interesting. It’s more immediately competitive – Olivia’s in the black and aiming for blue but Emma’s already in the blue and aiming for red. Sorry, Olivia’s crossing the lava while Emma is already swimming.
Sometimes I give them balloons to shoot at but I didn’t have any in my archery bag this time. It’s particularly useful for younger girls – you can occupy them when it’s not their turn to shoot by getting them to blow the balloons up. I am absolutely unable to blow balloons up, so that’s handy for me. The last lot of balloons I bought were virtually impossible to blow up. That kept an entire Guide camp busy and we ended up with about three balloons to aim at.
On this particular occasion, we played bingo. I keep a pack of index cards in my archery bag so I scribbled up a set of bingo cards and set them shooting to see who could get five in a row quickest. I’m going to get Excel to generate me some random sets of numbers and then laminate a dozen or bingo cards to be used with wipeclean pens for the future because that worked pretty well.
This time we didn’t have time to play crazy scoring but that’s another one I do – I get the girls to pick a random number for each colour and we get ourselves tied in knots trying to figure out what everyone’s scored. That one doesn’t work so well because we spend too much time scoring and no one knows which colour they want to be aiming at.
I’ve got another dozen games in my instructor handbook but the trouble is, a lot of them require custom targets. If you’ve got a big roll of plain wallpaper, that’s no problem, you can draw them. I would love to play naughts and crosses, for example or some variant on a card game but I never have the paper with me.
We finished the evening with another round of target shooting. This is partly because the girls like to declare a winner but partly because I like to see how much, if any, progress they’ve made. After two hours of teaching, it’s a bit like the end-of-lesson test. But I don’t tell them that because it’s not a lesson and there’s nothing formal about it and I don’t want to end a fun evening with stress.
You know the best thing about shooting with four Rangers? Once they’ve got settled and I’ve done some real instructing, I can sit back just a little and take a turn at shooting. In this case, it worked out nicely. I had enough right-handed bows to force us into two groups so I shot alongside my experienced one which left me free to help the younger ones.
So, we were having the end-of-session target round. I won, by quite a lot. I’m very happy to admit that. I’ve put enough time and money into making sure I’m the best of this little band that I’d be annoyed if I wasn’t. And also my oldest had to leave early for a birthday party so my biggest competition is gone. Of the three remaining, Number One wins. She’s improved. In second place is Number Three, believe it or not, the youngest Ranger, the one who could barely hit the target two hours ago. I’m so proud of her improvement and especially of spotting that she was shooting with the wrong bow. She’s gone from last by a long way to almost tied as first. And then there’s Number Two who’s come last, behind Number Three by just three points, but she’s been shooting pretty consistently. I’ve been keeping an eye on her but there’s not a lot I can do with her, she was doing fine from the start. She’s like my oldest, she just needs practice. Unfortunately, that means while I’m delighted with Number Three’s progress, poor Number Two feels like she’s now the bad one of the group and she’s absolutely not, she just feels like it because she was pretty good from the start.
I’ve got two more archery sessions booked in – I’m at a county camp licence weekend and then I’ve got a Brownie camp. Not my Brownies, the county outdoors adviser gave their leader my number and I agreed to come to their camp and do an archery session for them. That’s what my qualification is mostly for, teaching archery sessions for Girlguiding groups.
(Pictures are entirely of me for obvious reasons – we have rules about posting pictures of young members.)