What are good surfing schools?

What are the best surfing schools?

• Answer:

  To provide context to my answer, let me try to offer my definition of a good surf school.  I believe that a good school has the ability to break down the mechanics of surfing into small digestible components + employs surf coaches who can naturally teach. It is very difficult to find surf schools that have both.  Some schools have a good curriculum, but they employ surf bums who are teaching only to make enough to maintain their lifestyles.  Teaching is a skill and not everyone has it.  Conversely, some schools have good teachers but the schools themselves have not intellectually and methodically plan out how a person learns and progress in surfing.  You end up getting pushed into waves to feel good about your experience without building the foundation to surf on your own. To answer your question directly, I discovered a school in Costa Rica, Surf Simply, that has an intelligent teaching methodology plus surf coaches who are total geeks at heart.  They try to analyze the mechanics of surfing and try to teach them to you in logical chunks.  Check them out at http://www.surfsimply.com