Beginning Moves

Patience While Teaching

By Eric Dahlman

With a competition coming up, I’ve been spending my free time training newcomer dancers. Those of you who read my monthly column know how strongly I support teaching others ballroom dance. Teaching solidifies knowledge. If you can teach someone a skill, it improves your own proficiency.

Lately, teaching friends has been a humbling experience for me. I have been dancing for a couple of years and have reached a point where the basics of dance come automatically. Veteran dancers are able to feel their dance as a collective whole. Rise, fall, heel leads, weight change, posture, and tempo combine into one fluid motion. While no one ever truly achieves perfection, it is a large accomplishment from struggling to learn the first steps.

Experience also leads to a sort of ‘curse of knowledge.’ Once you learn something, it’s hard to imagine not having that wisdom. After you have normalized changing weight after each step in a waltz, it is frustrating watching beginners continually forget to change on the third beat. We ask ourselves, “how come they can’t grasp such a simple concept? Stepping with weight on the other foot is just the natural thing to do!”

Things always seem much easier after we’ve learned them, but you were probably once making the same mistakes. If somehow we could go back in time and meet ourselves at our first ballroom lesson, I can almost guarantee that the things that make the most sense to us now all were completely foreign to us then. Ballroom is a sport of nuances. Many concepts cannot be learned through simple words but rather by routine practice. Partner dancing requires muscle memory that can only be built by experience.

Teaching new dancers requires patience. People will make mistakes as they learn. However, watching others learn makes us reflect on our own growth. We were all once that student making their first stumbles on the floor. We are all still that student though, only now we struggle in other ways. Eventually we’ll forget ever having issues with the things we battle with today.

Ballroom dance is inherently a social activity and benefits from new people joining the sport. The seemingly high level of skill to enter dance intimidates others. As dancers with experience, it is our duty to open the doors to allow newcomers to enter. Sometimes this will be teaching our friends, and sometimes it will be social dancing with someone newly introduced. Regardless, we must always remember that we were once that fledgling dancer. No one was ever born a master. Give new dancers the patience you were given, and you might just learn something from them in return.