Easy as riding a bicycle?
My daughter is learning how to ride her bicycle without training wheels. It's a slow process, as a couple early unfortunate experiences have left her kind of skittish about the whole thing. (Or so I conclude. How else can someone who could happily spend a day on the fastest, scariest, most stomach-churning rides at the amusement park dissolve at the prospect of losing training wheels?)
Today I took her and her brother to Menlo School, where they could ride their bikes without worrying about auto traffic, and only a little foot traffic (mainly water polo players from Bellarmine Prep, and oversized guys in football jerseys). My daughter's now able to keep a decent balance when moving, but stopping and especially starting are problems. In the course of watching her try to start, I realized just how counterintuitive riding a bike is.
If you're a novice rider, your instinct is to get on the bike, make sure you're stable, and then start moving. After all. if you're not stable, you'll immediately fall over or hit something, right? But with a bicycle, what you need to do is start moving first, and that will generate stability. And in order to do that, you have to give up the idea that stability can exist independent of movement. Stability is a product of motion.
[To the tune of Little Feat, "Time Loves A Hero," from the album "Waiting For Columbus [Live]".]
If she wants a stable start, she could prepare a pedal to stand on (if you're looking at it, put it at the 10 o'clock position). She can then push off with her opposite foot while standing on the pedal and that might help her have both stability and speed (of forward movement).
And here's ask.meta's thread on learning to ride :-)
Posted by: Ken | September 21, 2005 at 03:05 PM