"That's It?" - Yes, Because I Wasn't Teaching You to Dance

"That's it?"

It was the end of an hour-long class. My voice had gone hoarse, and I couldn't seem to get enough air in my lungs to continue cueing for my new line dancing class. We learned one song - "AB Wagon Wheel" by Peter Probert.

"Yes ma'am, that's your entire dance."

A group of 6 women from the Granville Senior Center all beamed back at me. Many of them apologized for being there when they first came in. They explained their "inability to dance" away with "I came with her," "I have no rhythm," and "Can you tolerate us old people? We're a little slow."

It honestly had never crossed my mind that they couldn't get through this dance. I figured we might have to adjust, slow it down, break it into pieces, but never did I think they couldn't do it. But it was obvious they weren't convinced.

I knew something they didn't. I wasn't there to teach them choreography.

We learned a dance, yes, but what happened in that hour had very little to do with steps and counts. I saw the self-doubt every time it oozed onto the dance floor. I saw hands thrown up when we reached the back wall, and there was no guide. I hear the string of "sorry" after each question.

So I stopped teaching the dance.

I stopped leading from the front and stood with them. I moved to the back wall to help them through the first 4 walls. I made sure to point out weight changes where they were tricky, and by doing so, I gave them language for what they needed. It wasn't that they "couldn't dance." They needed repetition. They struggled with remembering to take weight. They needed practice with transitions between 8-counts. That's when it started to click.

They just hadn't learned enough yet to know what they needed help with. So they assumed they couldn't.

After the first 30 minutes, no hands were in the air. Nobody apologized for needing help. We broke every sequence down into its 8-counts and practiced them individually with steps, slowed counts, and then counts to tempo. We added each section back on slowly.

And they did it.

We danced the song twice, all the way through, once at 0.9x speed and the last at normal speed. I called counts when they could see me and steps when they couldn't.

They confidently held tempo. They had all the rhythm of a class that had been going for months.

So when she asked, "That's it?" I knew I had done my job.

Because I wasn't there to cram 3 dances into an hour. I was there to show them that not "being good" at something they haven't learned yet wasn't the problem they thought it was.