Learn to teach

Every Jump On! session is run by riders who volunteer. There is no paid staff, no certificate on the wall and, so far, no written standard — just people who learned, came back, and held the bar for the next person. This page is how that works today and what PEVRA is writing to make it hold up.

What a trainer does

Mostly, stands next to someone. A first ride on an electric unicycle is a balance problem before it is anything else, and what a learner needs is a steady thing to hold and a person who will not let go until they are asked to. At a session that is a hand, a training bar, or a shoulder, for as many attempts as it takes. Often it starts on two wheels: PEVRA brings Inmotion E20s, two-wheeled electric unicycles that anyone can ride within minutes, so a learner feels the machine move under them before they try the single wheel.

The rest is judgement that a written page cannot fully carry yet: knowing when to step back, when a learner is tired rather than stuck, when the lot has become too busy to keep going, and when to say “not today.” Before any learner gets on, the trainer offers them the full set of protection PEVRA brings — helmet, knee pads, elbow pads and gloves. Making that offer, to every rider, every time, is the one rule that has never been optional. Accepting it is the rider’s decision, and some decline.

Trainers ride themselves. Nobody teaches a wheel they cannot ride, and nobody is asked to teach a machine they have not spent time on — an electric skateboard, a scooter and a Onewheel each fall differently, and the trainer needs to know how.

How to start helping

  1. Come to a session as a rider first. The next one is announced on the learn page, and the day-of changes go out on Telegram. Ride, watch how the trainers work, and say you would like to help.
  2. You will be paired. New helpers work beside an experienced trainer for a session or more before they take a learner on their own. Nobody sits a test. A person who has done it many times watches how you do it.
  3. Bring a helmet, and bring patience. Trainers wear theirs; it is how the offer gets made without a speech. A wheel is provided if you do not own one. What cannot be provided is the willingness to try something new, be no good at it at first, and keep going until you are. Bodies learn while doing; brains learn while resting. Short rounds of ride, rest, ride pay off for the patient and the persistent — every time.

If you already run sessions somewhere else and want them under PEVRA’s name, write to info@pevra.org. Today PEVRA has no formal way to say yes, and the next section is why.

What is being written

Two things are being written, and this is what each one is.

A curriculum in “I can …” statements. Nine stages, from standing on the wheel with a hand held to riding unsupervised in traffic, each written as things the rider can now do — “I can mount without support,” “I can stop inside a marked box from walking pace.” The point is that “ready to ride alone” means the same thing to every trainer and can be checked against a rider rather than asserted about one. When they are done they will be on the learn page in full.

A coach ladder. Three rungs are drafted: Assistant Coach, Certified Coach and Coach Trainer. Nobody holds any of them yet. A public list of who does, and where, comes when the rungs are finished, because putting a name on a page that says “certified” makes a promise PEVRA has to be able to keep.

Whichever side of the bar you are on, know what your health coverage is, and what riding asks of you. Learning and riding both carry real risk, and a trainer is the first person who has to say so.

Most sessions are a few friends in a park with some wheels, and that is usually fine. PEVRA still checks, and complies with what a place requires: some cities want a permit for a group, some do not allow a freestanding enclosure on park ground, and a session that gets moved on by a ranger is a bad first lesson. PEVRA treats teaching as one of the twenty legal questions it asks of every place, alongside where you can ride and what you must wear, so the answer for a city is on that city’s page under Carrying and teaching, with the rule it comes from. Compare the teaching rule across every place PEVRA has researched, or look up yours. Where it says not yet verified, that is the truth, and a volunteer reading the code in a browser is how it stops being so.

Membership is what pays for the training; nobody at PEVRA is paid. More about PEVRA.

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