I grew up training in ballet and other dance styles with an authoritarian pedagogical teaching method. I remember my teachers picking on me daily and I thrived on it. I always wanted to please them and I always had to be perfect. I had to be the best. I had to jump the highest, turn the cleanest, turn the most, look the most graceful, have the proper form, have the best alignment and so on. I attended a recreational, minor competition studio in my younger days, but come middle school, I started at a performing arts magnet school that I had to audition to be at and I also attended a performing arts high school while training at a prestigious ballet studio.
I specifically remember my high school years training in ballet to be the most dramatic. I had choreographers and teachers from around the globe that came to my school and my ballet studio and they taught us everything we knew. But teaching nowadays is completely different than how I grew up. You never questioned your teachers, you never back talked, you never complained and you were always at your 100% energy and effort levels, if not more.
Teaching now, I have students’ parents that are way too involved in what happens in the classroom and go off what their child says and believes them, versus trusting their teachers and staying out of the way since they have absolutely no dance training. I have students that show up messy, late and never work hard in my class. When I discipline them, 8 out of 10 times a parent calls and complains. I have students that show up to ballet class and treat it as a social hour instead of being attentive and treating the class as training. They are not serious and they walk all over their teachers and complain to “mommy” at home that they are being picked on, singled out or called lazy in class and it hurts their feelings. When I grew up training, you didn’t have any feelings. It was what the teacher or the ballet mistress said and that was final. You were more scared of your dance teachers than your real parents, but at the same time you respected and admired them more than anyone else in the world.
I specifically remember having tap shoes thrown at my head and times I was screamed at to run laps around the theater to make our runs look like her were floating. I remember being forced to dance holding a trash can in front of me to make sure my arms were held properly and a time when a whole chair was thrown at us to make us move faster. I remember my ballet mistress and another modern dance teacher at school pulling me aside and telling me that my thighs were too thick and muscular. I recall being screamed at in Spanish and called things I didn’t understand because my Cuban ballet mistress needed me to work harder or got frustrated that I didn’t understand her Spanish and I was failing her. I had ballet teachers humiliate me in front of my peers and weave pencils and pens between my fingers and make me dance with them all class to correct my hands. I had teachers that cussed and screamed at us because “we could never get anything right.” I’ve heard stories of my same ballet teacher telling students to “quit dance already and just go flip burgers at McDonalds since they will never make it as a dancer anyways.” But comments like this didn’t shut us down. It made us angry and made us work even harder to prove them wrong. It made us push harder in order to get some form of approval or a head nod or a smile or anything at all from our teachers. Some of us even “made it” somewhere and got to laugh and slyly smile at them when they ran into us years later and asked what we were doing now with our life. But during it all, there was nothing we could do about it and our parents were always on our dance teachers’ side if we tried to complain. If you didn’t like it, there was the door and your possible future dance career was gone.
What happened to me during my training years did traumatize me, but it made me into an amazing, employed dancer today. When I first started teaching, I vowed to myself never to traumatize my dancers the way I was. I joke with my students about the weird and funny things that my teachers did to me and I mimic them to make them laugh. All my students know about my infamous teachers that I had growing up now. But that is the way I now run my class… with laughter and joy. I make my students giggle, smile and enjoy class. Because of this, they know that when it is time to be serious and they can turn right around and with the flick of a switch they know to to find their concentrated serious side. I give challenging combinations but I pepper them with fun analogies to get them to apply certain technique and forms and it seems to work better than being mean and scaring them half to death.
There are times when I have to be more authoritarian, but that is usually when my students have taken too much leeway and have goofed around too much in class or when they are not putting forth their best efforts in their training and they have irritated me beyond measure. I let my kids have fun in class but when they take it too far, that is when I get more aggressive. When they become lazy, that is when my past training comes through and I almost start acting like my teachers did. A teacher can only do so much.
Just recently, I taped two of my students’ hands into blades with clear masking tape because their hands were overly flowery and extra. This did not hurt them at all, they were still able to move their hand, but they found it hilarious and it got my point across and corrected their hands for the time being. I like to do funny physical things like this instead of acting meanly. I add humor and they admire the points that I make in my class. They seem to remember it more and it comes across as something that they need to improve upon.
I do have punishments for when my students don’t pay attention, when they are lazy, when they are late or giving up on trying and so forth. But these punishments actually make them stronger. I make them hold a plank and if they drop then everyone has to start from the beginning. We do wall sits or a challenge that I like to call “Sally” to a song that Moby sings and they do Coastguard flutter kicks and other fun, but challenging exercises. These exercises teach them that every action will have a reaction and there are consequences for every action that they take. It is up them to make these reactions or consequences positive. In the meantime, their punishments are self-inflicted pain due to their actions. But majority of the time, I yell at my students, but in funny ways, I waddle around the classroom, I make jokes, I make witty competitive remarks to the students about each other and more. But there is always joy in my studio classroom and my students will always know that I care about them and will always challenge and push them.
[Above is a funny video of how I yell at my students. I waddle around and yell at them to jump higher and to smile while I make a goofy face in front of them as they are going across the floor.]
