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Tango Beginner to Tango Teacher

This post was inspired by one on teaching styles on Tango Immigrant's blog http://tangoimmigrant.blogspot.co.nz/2013/08/the-long-and-winding-road.html

I learned tango the usual way via a mix of local and visiting teachers. The visitors would arrive two or three times per year, talk briefly about technique in their classes and then teach us new steps. This was what most people wanted (including me at first) but when I started looking for more and took private lessons I still didn't get the basic understanding of the dance that I was looking for. 

I had group classes and solos in New Zealand, Australia, Germany, the USA and the UK but in hindsight I would say that while those lessons kept the tango dream alive they didn't advance my dancing very much. 

The first big step forward was going to Buenos Aires and finding a good teacher who showed us the body mechanics of tango. It became much easier after that but it took many group classes with many teachers in order to find him. 

The second big step forward in my dancing, which happened simultaneously with the first, was realizing that group classes were almost worthless. They keep the dream alive, perform a social function, and give students a sense of making progress  but (in my experience) accomplish little else apart from allowing teachers to generate an income. (This isn't necessarily a bad thing:  'buyer beware'; 'dancers shouldn't rely on teachers to develop themselves' and all that)

This was driven home when we started teaching group classes ourselves. We would describe and demonstrate concepts, hands-on with students as much as possible in a 60-90 minute class. We tried to keep things easy to learn, interesting and fun, but the group classes gave too little time to each person, and the differing motivations of each student meant that our efforts were usually frittered away. We made wonderful new friends from the group classes but decided that our spare time would be better spent together rather than continuing a mostly fruitless activity. 

We only teach solos now, with much more satisfying results, although the financial return is far less than group classes and workshops. One won't grow a tango scene by significant numbers this way but that is what group classes are for, and there will always be people who feel that group classes work better for them, despite all evidence to the contrary. 

Incidentally, regarding my comment about group classes/teacher income not being a bad thing, it motivates the marketing of tango and helps to keep it growing. My only concern is when examples arise such as a ballroom studio that had a throughput of 500 tango argentino students per year, of which virtually none  moved on to their local tango scene, whether practicas or milongas. Those that did found that the sequences they had learned bore almost no relation to the tango world outside their studio. It was a great business model, it just wasn't very good for growing tango. 


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