Learning to swim

One of my classmates, Christina, took the time to write a thoughtful reply to my post In over her head. This post started as a reply to her, but it got kinda long so I've rewritten it as a post of its own.

How do people learn? What works best for most people is to start with what they already know and teach them the new skills in increments. If the increments are too small we don't learn as fast as we could and may get bored. If the increments are too big we struggle to understand and often learn more slowly than with optimally-sized increments.

Unfortunately, the optimal increment is different for each person, and often different from day to day for the same person. An instructor teaching a group has little choice other than to teach at some intermediate increment. The students at the top of the class won't learn as much as they might, while those at the bottom will struggle. But the only real alternative is private lessons, where each can be tailored to the individual student that day.


This only works if all the students have enough of an understanding of the material to be able to grasp what is being taught. Trying to teach someone to parallel park a car isn't going to work if that person doesn't understand how to use the steering wheel.

Christina mentions the option of "sightseeing" in a class that is beyond your skill level. That is fine, of course, if the instructor is okay with it. I've seen students drop in on a class who have never done a pirouette en dedans before and have had to substitute a passé relevé instead. I certainly have walked through steps I didn't understand or couldn't do, and sometimes do it still.

I remember all too well the first few times I took Susan's Beginner II class. I wrote about it in this blog in March 2013. At that point I'd had two years of ballet, often taking multiple classes a week, including beginner classes with RoAnne, Susan, Julie, and several instructors at other schools. Yet I felt damned near lost. Wasn't this supposed to be merely the next level above the classes I was already taking?

Some weeks later one of the other students pulled me aside after class and explained that this really wasn't a beginner class at all. It was such a relief to realize that it wasn't entirely my fault for not understanding how to perform the steps I was being asked to perform, and often not even understanding what those steps were. I sometimes spent hours after class looking through various websites and reference books trying to figure out the name of a step and then how it was supposed to look.

To this day I still find myself saying "Huh?" in this class. One of the reasons I did the grand allegro combinations with the last group that day was so I could watch others doing the combination enough times that I had a chance of figuring out what we were supposed to do because I really didn't understand at first.

The woman I wrote about was having trouble figuring out which way to face at the barre, which leg to stand on, and what a tendu was. This is a normal and reasonable level of confusion for someone taking their second ballet class. But it seemed pretty clear to me she was never going to be able even "sightsee" her way though the rest of that particular class. She'd already told Susan twice that she thought she was in the wrong class. All I wanted to do was to give her the same information I'd been given about the actual level of Susan's "Beginner II" class so she didn't think that she was somehow at fault for feeling lost in that class.