Dragging you down and wasting your money

Argentine tango is a rather difficult dance to learn, though very satisfying, and if you want to get good at it you have to be quite proactive and intelligent about your learning. You have to be realistic, and solve the problems you encounter one at a time. For example, if you are seriously pursuing actual competence as a leader or follower, there are some things that you give a high priority. They include being able to balance and rotate on one foot with your feet together, and being able to point your shoulders at least moderately in a different direction from your hips. If you are a leader they also include following occasionally; and if it bothers you to dance with another man, well, giving in to that will make you significantly less competent than you would otherwise be. Tough. Either get over that little bit of superstitious dread, or sacrifice competence to it. Your choice. You also have to deal calmly and sensibly with not getting it quite right first time.

Group classes are very good for learning a social dance because you dance with lots of different people and you have to adapt. But perhaps the most pervasive annoyance when you are learning in groups is people who can't do the things it's necessary to be able to do in order to benefit from the content of the class. The teacher can do one of two things; ignore them and let them struggle and prevent their dancing partners getting anything out of the class, or adjust the class level to the least competent person there. That drags everyone down and wastes the time and money of all the students in the class who are genuinely trying to manage their own learning intelligently.

And it is the followers who suffer most. Generally I go to every class with some idea in mind of an aspect of technique that I am going to pay attention to regardless of the specific content of the class. I may seek feedback on it or I may not; generally I'll just give it mental attention in executing whatever comes up. If something does come up in the class that's new or challenging or interesting, then I'll drop my plan and seek feedback and help, and put whatever it is on my list to work on. But I never assume that I will get the opportunity to work on the actual advertised content of the class - even if that includes anything at all directed at the followers.

Please understand that inexperience doesn't make you a bad dancer. Beginners are usually not bad at all. It takes time, ambition, and delusion to be bad in the sense I'm using it here. What it takes specifically is learning lots of things and going to lots of classes without ever solving the real problems that have to come first; posture, balance, dissociation, walk.

Very often the teachers contribute heavily to this by never spelling out what the prerequisites are, which is the least you can possibly do. I think it's rude and thoughtless that teachers don't do this. They should at least say in advance what the class is about, and what you should be able to do, as leader and follower, with confidence and competence in order to make use of it.

It's not unusual to find that teachers don't even seem to bother to tell people that they have a problem, or that the problems have a physical hierarchy (which they do) so that solving one will make it much easier to solve something else. They don't treat people like adults and say "you have a problem with your balance which is causing you to find this difficult. You should work on that for a while, and then this will be easy. Let me suggest some exercises." They don't say "fix your walk - your feet are too far apart and your posture is mistaken - try changing this one thing, and class X next week at venue Y taught by Z would be a good place to work on it." They just sigh, and let the other students, especially the women, suffer.

It's not rude to make a gentle but matter-of-fact statement about what the problem is, especially if you then make a sensible suggestion for dealing with it. It just isn't. I think it's what you're supposed to do.

It also is not rude to say something like "Beginners please sit down now and have a rest, drinks are over there. The next class will be about Whatever and to benefit from it as a leader/follower you will need good balance and to be able to do X with confidence. It starts in five minutes." No, that's not rude - it's treating all your students with proper professional respect. You have to think carefully about what X should be, that's all.

It seems to me that I'm stating the bleeding obvious here. Am I wrong?

But I understand that some people find these situations very awkward. It gets tiresome and frustrating and it can sap the teacher's morale.

So, over to you. As a student, how have you seen this dealt with? What worked, and what didn't? If you have ever been the teacher, how do you deal with these awkward situations and how much of a struggle is it for you?