How not to teach

[Darshiva]

I don't know that visualisations will necessarily help. Different people respond to different learning techniques. I for one, am not so great with visualisations. Good at soming up with them, as it turns out, but they just don't work for me.

I'd probably stand her behind me & run a drill where she needs to not be able to see herself in the mirror. If she sees any part of herself during this exercise, she needs to correct her posture & try again. This one usually works where other techniques fail because it works on aural, visual AND kinesthetic levels to challenge them to find the 'wrong' themselves and make it 'right'.

[Greek Bonfire]

Technique? What technique? Her hands and arms were totally repulsive. I thought it was a skit from Saturday Night Live.

[gisela]

Gaaaah!

[Aniseteph]

The weird thing is the students are doing the same thing - they look like they've been drilled into it, not like a bunch of all-over-the-place beginners might. So I can quite believe she'd been doing whatever this is for 10 years, and successfully teaching it to others. Whatever it is. (This is not a good thing).

I wonder if this is what happens if you try to learn from a book and never have anyone to correct you. And never see what it should look like or how you are doing.

[Jeanne]

A serious question - was there better dancing around in 1993? I didn't start until around 1996, and the internet age wasn't very far away. If she has been teaching for ten years I would guess she studied for at least one or two years before that (not condoning just going for a minimum estimate), so that would have started her dance education around 1981 or 1982 at the latest. It's my understanding that there weren't a lot of touring instructors at the time, so you pretty much learned from local teachers. If they had poor teachers it would have been so easy to have a bunch of pretty girls in shiny costumes who couldn't really dance. Costumes were all hand made, and the music selection was limited to a couple of tapes (at least here). I know there are veteran dancers here - do tell! What was your local dance scene like back in the day?

I started dancing in the 1980s, and there were actually a reasonable number of teachers who traveled and gave workshops. Suhaila (who was 18 the first time I attended one of her workshops!) was already traveling and teaching then, and I remember taking workshops from Cassandra, Delilah, Amir, Bobby Farrah, and others. I was in a reasonable-sized city (St. Louis, MO), so it was easier to be around these events when they ocurred, but dancers from small towns all over the area streamed in to partake as well.

Although there wasn't as much instructional video available then as now, and it was harder to locate, there were at least some quality teaching tapes to be had. I thinki anyone who seriously wanted access to some kind of good instruction could have found a way.