How not to teach

[Darshiva]

I'm a massive, massive clutz myself - and I had poor initial training. Both can be overcome. The only thing that limits your development as a dancer are the limitations of body & mind.

 

[walladah]

I can be more mean than Shanazel!

Shanazel, thank you for this video!

If there is such an instructional VHS-DVD, then i now understand why i have met (!) and also found dancers on youtube dancing exactly like this lady.

At the end, it is the perfect video for dancers who do not want to bother themselves too much.

Then it holds: the student finds the teacher she needs.

 

[Shanazel]

Mean? MOI??:shok:

 

[Farasha Hanem]

Mean? MOI??:shok:

Non, mais non! :shok: :lol:

 

[Shanazel]

Okay, unless we talk about food, that just about exhausted all the francaise I parlez.

Try me on German. I speak fluent Beethoven.

 

[walladah]

i mean i am mean

because i can talk worse not only about the video but also about other dancers who are like the video and for years i was wondering who their instructor might have been...

i did not mean really you are mean, it was just a meaning-joke about me being really mean!!!

 

[Shanazel]

Ooooooooooooooh. :lol:

Good. I didn't think I was being mean, but suppose mean is a relative term.

 

[Ahava_Melantha]

this was actually one of the first bd videos I ever got at 15. funny. wasn't the best - but whatever.

 

[Suzanne Azhaar]

Nice endorsement by Eddie Rabbit. The rest was~ cute (and a whole lot of :shok: ).

 

[Za Linda]

Oh dear. So sad to see someone demonstrating poor skills to students.

This kind of video would be good for an analytical discussion in a teaching course, along the lines of:
1) What techniques or moves is this instructor doing incorrectly?
2) If this instructor came to you as a student, what are three physical points you could focus on to improve her dancing?
3) What visualisations do you think would help this instructor to improve her movement and techniques?
(Sorry, once a teacher; always thinking about pedagogy)

I did like her blue-and-silver veil. It reminds me of fish swimming in a shallow sea.

 

[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.