First Mainstream Class Report

[bjarvis]

Last night, kent4str and I conducted the first of 14 weekly Monday square dance classes. At last week's open house, we had three newbies; this evening, we had six. With another open house this coming Thursday with the Arlington Gay & Lesbian Association, we may yet gain a couple more dancers.

The new folks are square dance sponges! It was our general plan to show a number of basic moves gradually across the course of the evening, then practise & drill with variations on those moves. I always anticipate that new dancers would have some general confusion between their left & right, have difficulty finding the beat and generally struggling to coordinate their feet and their hands without doing damage to themselves or their dance partners. This --to my surprise-- didn't happen.

We started with the usual fundamental calls: circle left, circle right, heads/sides into the middle & back, etc. They ate it up. Over the next hour, we gradually added promenade, dosado, partner swing, allemande left and right & left grand. No problems, no hitches, no hesitation.

We pushed a little further: pass thru, U turn back, men/ladies promenade inside the square, couples promenade 1/2, etc.. No issues.

I suspect we could have added a few more calls but declined: with the open house on Thursday where we may recruit some additional bodies, we didn't want this lot to get so far ahead that we could never integrate the newer dancers effectively. As well, everyone at this point had a heady feeling of success and would be leaving the hall with a sense of accomplishment and happiness: I didn't want to threaten by possibly hitting a point of overload. Keep 'em happy & entertained and they'll come back again & again (and forgive the occasional off night).

Thus, we wrapped up and called it a night about 10 minutes before originally scheduled. It felt right, and from later comments I'm inclined to allow myself the indulgence that the evening was a success.

Comments

[billeyler.livejournal.com]

I don't know if you've found the "Square Thru" overload point yet. That's my general experience after teaching 60 or more beginners classes. The "Sponge" effect lasts through most of the traditional calls, but after about 25 calls, it starts slogging down a bit.

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've seen the point where absorbing new material takes more effort, when slight resistance starts to become noticeable. I haven't associated it with a particular call or family of calls; more often, I associate it with a particular balance point in a session.

As we go throught the course, the review time at the beginning of each session gradually becomes a little longer and the time available for totally fresh calls becomes slightly shorter. Resistance seems to manifest when the review time expands to about 20 minutes, which I'm guessing is about 1/3 of the way through the call list. I'm hoping to keep this under control with class-level calling at club nights and carefully orchestrating the reviews to hit multiple calls within short span.

I'm also looking carefully at Stewart Kramer's article on memory & recall from the June 2006 GCA newsletter with the hope of squeezing some additional efficiency out of limited floor time.

My inner geek is looking for useful metrics and efficiencies... with a little luck, I'll learn as much from this course as our new dancers.

[billeyler.livejournal.com]

This next class (Wilde Bunch #63), I'm going to shorten the Basic list for a shorter entry program. Right now, I teach Basic in 15-17 weeks through Ferris Wheel and more casually teach the Mainstream Continuation in the next term over the same period. I've known for a while that I should change this, but occasionally we have callers come through that do remember the Basic portion of the Mainstream list and that's the dance level for the new dancers.

One of the things that is difficult as a traveling caller is to get a random list with "we've taught the dancers THESE calls, so don't call the other calls." Surely they must know how difficult that is to keep track of! I don't even try anymore, rare do two groups use the same teaching order. I just call one program below, or just KISS.

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

Reminds me of the first time I was calling outside of my home area. Kent & I had an opening tip for a fly-in. We were there early, got the equipment set up, tested the sound system and were all set to go. Everyone was squaring up when Betsy Gotta runs up from the floor.

Betsy, handing us a list: By the way, the newbies have two more weeks of classes left. Don't use these 10 calls.

Brian & Kent (off-mic): Aw, crap.

[billeyler.livejournal.com]

EXACTLY! You'd better become a full sight/extemporaneous caller on the fly in a hurry in that case! :-)

[kent4str.livejournal.com]

Luckily, Dayle starte us out on sight-calling (talk about the deep end!), but it was still tough to do it with one eye on the floor and one on the list.