bjarvis | Mainstream Class #2

Tonight's Mainstream square dance class went pretty well, much like last week. We're keeping the six newbies and added another from last Thursday's open house so I'm happy with the numbers: at this point in my career, it's probably more beneficial for all involved to keep the class a relatively small size. More than our two squares might eat into my limited but growing attention span.

Despite the lack of parking on site, the class started on time. Review of last week's class went quickly: there was surprisingly little difficulty of any of the prior calls.

This week, we added the half-sashay family (half-sashay, rollaway with a half-sashay, ladies in/men sashay, etc.), backtrack, courtesy turn, right & left thru, two/four ladies chain and dopaso. Again, they soaked it all up and we spent the last 15 minutes of the class simply drilling the calls or looking for novel uses.

I'm going to have to redraft our original syllabus: some of my original thoughts on ordering of calls have been jettisoned out the window and some shuffling has occurred. By the late fall, we'll have our own polished document.

I broached the topic of Columbus Day coming up in two weeks. I wanted to get a feel from the class about whether we should cancel that class session, make it drill only or use that Monday as a regular instructional event. Our newbies wanted to check with their employers and calendars before committing to a course of action so we'll make that particular decision next week.

kent4str & I both have to work so we're not traveling anywhere: we'll go with whatever our dancers want.