Good Teachers?

To be honest, the reason why I'm keeping up a blog is because I received a comment on a research paper that perhaps I can pursue writing. If this is successful enough, maybe I'll look into writing or something of the sort as a side job. (Question for you guys: why type of writing should I do? Books? Articles? Science? Fictional stories? Or do I just suck at writing altogether and stick to something else?)

Anyway. Onto the next controversial topic:


Q: How can you tell if someone is a good dancer?
A: Watch/dance with them.

Q: How can you tell if someone is a good teacher?
A: Watch/dance with their students.

While we're on that topic, I believe that there are some teachers who are extra-good at teaching beginners (and retaining them), and others that are extra-good at teaching intermediate/advanced students, and making them better. There are definitely a rarer few teachers who can incubate the egg, hatch it, raise the chick, and change them into swans...most chicks will swap teachers for a long time before reaching a certain stage. For teachers who teach higher-level classes, though, they must be very competent in the dance. It may be fine for some teachers to teach very beginning classes if they are pretty good (limiting to weight change, walks, rocks steps, etc...), and good at explaining basic concepts and techniques, but it would be a disaster for them to try to teach advanced concepts if they're messy in the dance themselves. I myself know several really great dancers who started out with teachers great at teaching beginners...and then they moved to other teachers later on.

Take many classes from many teachers on many topics. Then decide who you learned the most from, and come back for more.

--for the nerds--

Psychologists Richard Snow and David Lohman of Standford University and University of Iowa did some research way back in 1984 on learning, instruction, and aptitude. You can find the article yourself, but in summary, low aptitude students benefit a lot from high quality instruction (but benefit only a little with low quality instruction). High aptitude students will do well no matter what, although high quality instruction will push them to do even better than low quality instruction.

So those who are DESTINED to do tango will find tango and become good at some point, although finding a good mentor will make them really amazing rather than just good. Those who need more work--that's when finding a good teacher is really important. By high-aptitude, I mean that these students will put in their own time and effort to review the material, go over it again, study it, and work hard in class--without necessarily having to be pushed. They may be able to correct their own mistakes through imitation rather than being corrected and so on and so forth. In the context of tango, they probably also have some movement background or ab strength....but of course, there are those, who just plain worked hard (and got from really bad (in her own words) to really amazing (in my own words)), like my own mentor, who is now traveling around the country and world teaching tango.