Audrey

"Thanks for your article, Skip. I've been dancing since 1951 and I've been the newsletter editor for the San Diego Swing Dance Club off and on for the past fifteen years. I know what our newsletter readers want. Our club gets about twenty or thirty brand new dancers a month. Only about two or three stick around long enough to really learn the dance. I've interviewed several people that have quit after a few lessons. Their universal complaints are: the instructor talks too much and they don't understand the lingo." Ron Ford, editor of the SDSDC newsletter.

When I began writing Imperial Swing Dancing many years ago, I was uncertain about the best way to describe the many dance moves that I was learning at the different swing clubs around St. Louis. Should I emphasize Jan Altman's* insightful philosophy that: "you can choose to make dancing as easy or as challenging as you want; however, the easier that you make it, the harder it is for you to become very good at it?" Or, should I downplay the challenging details in favor of Marie Jamison's* more folksy philosophy that is summed up by her quote: "open and close, open and close, how you get in and out is what swing's all about?" Not that these two philosophies are necessarily mutually exclusive but they do open up Pandora's box with the controversy of just how much detail is too much detail, and this is a slipperier question than the slopes of the fabled glass mountain in Grimm's Fairy Tales! Writing a dance manual and teaching a dance class are entirely different disciplines but after much deliberation I ended up writing my manual more like Webster wrote his dictionary; that is, with sufficient detail for the motivated. However, what's the best way to teach a class? This question has not been a priority for me because I have not been teaching recently; however, Ron Ford's email to me was just the catalyst that I needed to refocus my attention on this important subject.

One of the most enduring axioms of life is that "nothing succeeds like success," and a reliable way to determine the best technique for teaching a dance class is to take a look at how the most outstanding dance instructors teach their classes. What behavior do they have in common? The answer is that all of these successful teachers instruct in a very supportive, non-judgemental manner, and they do it with a great sense of good-natured humor. It is not possible to recognize these dedicated and talented people individually here because the St. Louis dance community is blessed with a disproportionate number of these gifted instructors, but suffice it to say that the lessons they teach are memorable because they conduct them in a fun and interesting manner, not because they teach them with excessively detailed explanations using confusing "lingo." These experienced instructors understand and accept the fact that not all students take lessons to improve their dancing proficiency; some attend classes primarily for social reasons that center around their ardent, heart-thumping expectation of meeting the alluring person across the room in an upcoming partner rotation. Dance class is often a microcosm of the Love Boat.

It is no accident that the supportive, good-natured instructors always attract the largest classes. If they are proficient enough to simplify the details of their patterns with a little humor and they understand that every student is unique and motivated by his or her own personal goals, then they know what I have recently learned, which is that fun and interesting dance lessons rule!

*Note: Jan Altman and Marie Jamison are both dance directors at the St. Louis Imperial Dance Club for the monthly and weekly dances respectively.

Copyright 2008 Skip Culver, Certified Swing Instructor. Member of the West County Swing Dance Club and author of the manual: Imperial Swing Dancing (visit: http://www.ImperialSwing.com)

Henry H. "Skip" Culver, Jr. is a member of the West County Swing Dance Club in St. Louis Missouri. He is a Gold Seal Instrument Flight Instructor and the author of the bestselling book on navigation titled: IFR 'Pocket Simulator' Procedures. In 2000 Skip turned his attention from aviation towards the dance floor. He became a Certified Swing Dance Instructor in 2004, and then with over seven years of detailed notes from various classes and workshops in hand, he began assembling the Imperial Swing Dancing manual which he published in June of 2007. Skip is a frequent contributor of articles on swing dancing to different club newsletters throughout the United States.