Hi I’m Bernadette!
I started teaching swimming lessons summer after my freshman year in high school in the Bay Area at a place called Pals Swim School in San Mateo, CA.
Pals was originally located at Serra High School and employed 32-40 high school and college aged young adults to teach swimming lessons. (We all were required to wear blue bathing suits, so we all looked very uniform) and often met each other outside of work to hear someone’s band play or go to the drive-ins and other fun summer escapades after teaching every day in the pool together. It was a very fun summer job!
Most of the instructors taught private lessons from 8:30 am – 5:00 pm with a one-hour lunch and a half hour break. I started as an “aide” and by the 4th session of that summer, I was thrilled to be able to teach my own lessons! The owners of the swim school were an amazing pair of sisters, (daughters of teachers themselves) who had started teaching swim lessons in their parents’ backyard pool. They taught me how to teach swimming and, in an essence, how to teach and how to swim – still two of my favorite things 36 summers later!
When I was a young girl, our family had a membership to the Los Altos, Adobe Creek Country Club. The club had 6 pools and 14 tennis courts. We used to drive down during the summer and hang out by the pool. I remember watching adult swim laps and being moved by the beauty and grace of the different strokes. On 4th of July the Club would have funny competitions, like who could finish drinking beer from a baby bottle first? They would also have swim races and I remember being so excited to swim against other kids my age. I can still remember when the race started, trying so hard to go fast and trying to roll my head to get air and just gulping in a ton of water and not going fast at all. I envied the beauty and grace of people who knew how to swim.
After my freshman year of high school, I got a job and Pals and by learning how to teach the strokes, I was able to learn how to swim them. I have taught swimming lessons every summer since this first summer when I was 14, (except the year my daughter was born in May).
I went on to become a PE teacher.
In the fall of 2013, I taught a swimming class for one quarter at Reed College
