Most children seem to love jumping into the water – the children I teach would spend the whole swimming lesson leaping into the water if I let them. It is unusual, but the other day one of my adult pupils surprised me by asking about jumping and even diving into the water. He is a new swimmer. He’s only been learning for a few months so this was brave of him. I think he probably meant “sometime in the future – when I can swim properly”. But it got me thinking. I started to wonder what it is the children love about it.
When children learn to swim, perhaps when they learn anything, they want to play all the time. For adults, learning becomes a serious business. It’s all about technique and getting it right. When I was a child, we spent hours jumping, diving, getting things off the bottom of the pool, holding our breath for as long as possible, daring each other to leap off the highest boards, flipping backwards into the pool, racing one another until we started to shiver with cold and had to get out. It was through all this playing that we learned to really swim and feel confident and safe in the water.
One little boy that I teach told me that when he jumps in the water is all fizzy, and I realised he was talking about the thousands of tiny bubbles that explode on to your skin when you enter the water forcibly. I started to realise that learning to jump in might be good for the adult learners too – but first I needed to try it out for myself.
Luckily the pool where I swim myself has a deep end. The campaigners who fought against the pool being closed also fought to keep the depth. Management wanted to fill it in. A shallower pool means less water to heat, which is cheaper. Like many pools we have lost the diving boards, but we do still have the luxury of deep water to swim in.
Next time I went swimming I walked straight to the deep end, held my nose and jumped in. It was a surprising sensation, one that I had almost forgotten. The change from air to water is so sudden. You feel and hear the splash as you enter the water and the noisy pool environment is instantly replaced by the muffled silence of the water. Just as my little pupil pointed, out I could feel the tiny bubbles bursting on my skin, and as I had my goggles on I could also see them sparkling around me. As soon as you are submerged, your body starts to feel lighter as the water gently catches you. My instinct was to start paddling my way up to the surface but then I stopped and let the water take over. I wanted to see what would happen if I did nothing at all. I felt myself being lifted towards the surface and within a few seconds my head popped up out of the water. I found myself laughing and I immediately wanted to do it again. When my friend arrived at the pool I told her about my experiment and she wanted to try too. We jumped together. When we came up we were both laughing. We decided to do it again, this time holding hands. We felt like children.
Next time I saw my adult pupil who had started all this in the first place I told him we were going to have to go to a deeper pool so he could try it for himself.
We went to the new pool and after swimming for a few minutes I reminded him why we were there. He climbed out of the water looking nervous. I told him that the only thing he needed to worry about was jumping far enough out not to hit the side of the pool and if he should happen to reach the bottom of the pool to bend his knees on landing. I had already checked out the depth and knew that it was deep enough to jump, but not so deep as to be terrifying. When he was in the pool, he could just about reach the surface of the water if he stood on tiptoe. As we stood on the side looking at the water I offered to hold his hand and jump together. He looked slightly horrified and took a step backwards. I am not sure whether it was fear, embarrassment or a sense of just wanting to get it over with but he gathered his courage, stepped forward, and jumped into the water, for the first time ever. When he came up to the surface he was laughing and said, “I’m going to do that again.”
And he did, many times. We have started work on diving. He is not quite Tom Daley yet, but at the age of whatever he is, anyway, quite grown up, he is not only learning to swim but has discovered the incredible joy of jumping in.
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