Looking at pictures of my little 4-year-old niece and her other friends learning to swim, I’m fondly reminded of my own learning-to-swim experience as a child. I don’t remember how old I was the first time I went for formal lessons – I must have been about five years old. I remember that the teacher claimed to be adopting some Australian method of teaching swimming. What is the Australian method of teaching? They seem to combine the hand motion of breaststroke and freestyle kicking. I remember that my first lesson was one-to-one in the learning pool, the water about 1.2m high. For a five-year-old, that was pretty deep. I enjoyed the first lesson despite learners’ issue of drinking chlorinated pool water and getting water into every facial orifice at the same time. But it was fun because being in water is fun.
The scary bit came in the second week of lesson. It’s a trauma that I can still recall today. The instructor brought us to the deep end of the adult pool and threw us into the water. I recall being flung out and I sank deep down and experienced for the first time in my life the full glory of 6 feet under. We had to struggle, to paddle, to make our way back to the edge of the pool. Every child bawled and cried and stood shivering. The exercise was repeated, not only within the class but the next few weeks. At that point I had an intense fear of going to swimming class. Before class starts, I’d start bawling already and soon we withdrew from the class. What did I learn? Nothing much but how to struggle to shore.
It was only when I went to primary school that I picked up swimming again, this time a Singapore teaching method that kept me safe in the learning pool for a while. Now, almost 20 years since those infernal swimming/drowning classes, I think I understand why it was so. We must all learn to sink before we can learn to swim. When we are gripped by that intense fear of drowning, when our lungs fill with water and we choke, we struggle and we make it out alive. No one told me then that the instructor won’t really leave me to die. Half-naked men in goggles and Speedos didn’t exactly look like the benevolent sort. I didn’t know there was a safety net, that if I were in real distress someone will rescue me. I made it out alive anyway. We all did, all the tortured children in that class. But the thing remains – I will never know if that class played a pivotal role in making me an adept swimmer today. Perhaps there’s a quota of chlorinated water everyone has to swallow before fully learning to swim, just like there’s a quota of knee-floor impact everyone has to have before being able to cycle.
Ah, the learner days.
