Thread: Student actions/comments that left you speechless.

I have, on more than one occasion, been rendered speechless by a student's comment or action. And those of you who know my mouth, know that it takes A LOT to do that. :)

So for the list of top 10 "You've got to be sh_tting me" things we've heard from students, can I add:

1. I'm quitting classes after 18 months because I want to pursue my dance goals.
If those goals involved classes with another instructor or a private instructor, I would totally get it. But no, this one decided to teach and promote herself as a professional dancer.

2. I quit your Level 1 class a year ago so I could teach my friends, and now I've run out of things to teach them so I need to see your Lvl2 syllabus to know what to teach them now.
I was HONESTLY speechless when I heard this one.

3. I don't like this class because I don't want to learn how to make a choreography or learn how to improvise. I just want to learn how to DANCE.
Again, speechless. Maybe I have really bad comprehension, but WTH?

4. Can't you just teach me all the moves NOW and I can learn and practice them later?
I'm bringing my "Instant Mastery Magic Wand" to class now. Actually, this student became a very good friend when I got her to understand WHY I teach the way I do. :)

5. How long do I have to stay in class before I get a job?
The earliest I heard this one was in the 4th class -- despite the fact that we live in a town with no Middle Eastern restaurants and NO public jobs dancing.


It boggles the mind...

I had a phone call from somebody who asked me if I taught a class on how to teach bellydance, and I told her that nobody I knew of taught an entire class focused on training teachers, but that she could contact bellydance teachers in the area to for private instruction on the subject. Shame on me for making the assumption that this person had prior dance experience, because her next question was, how many bellydance classes do I need to take before I could teach? I was pretty toungue-tied after that, I'm sure I babbled something about years and experience and probably scared her away because she never showed up to my class, thank goodness!

Howabout someone who turns up to your intermediate class, once, after missing three weeks, and never having done the style I teach before, complaining that the class was too advanced.

Can we give a prize?
I LOVE #3!!!..l;,
Rosette

Very similar to post #3 is when students come to week 1, then miss 6 weeks, then come back to week 8 and complain that I haven't taught all this stuff- why is it so hard!?!

Tribal dancers use the muscles whereas oriental dancers use the skeleton. OH KAY.

Originally Posted by zumarrad

Tribal dancers use the muscles whereas oriental dancers use the skeleton. OH KAY.

As far as I know, you can't even move your skeleton without using your muscles.

I do hear this one a lot.

Someone recently told me that american dancers use their muscles and egyptian dancers use mostly their skeleton. I don't really buy that for the above mentioned reason....

Originally Posted by zumarrad

Tribal dancers use the muscles whereas oriental dancers use the skeleton. OH KAY.

So where do the oriental dancers park their muscles while they dance? In the closet, next the tribal dancers bones? ,r:;

as for #3... wow! because none of that has to do with being a dancer?

Originally Posted by zumarrad

Tribal dancers use the muscles whereas oriental dancers use the skeleton. OH KAY.

Originally Posted by mrsnj20

Someone recently told me that american dancers use their muscles and egyptian dancers use mostly their skeleton. I don't really buy that for the above mentioned reason....

Have they even *seen* any Egyptian dancers?

Originally Posted by zumarrad

Tribal dancers use the muscles whereas oriental dancers use the skeleton. OH KAY.

This is breathtakingly stupid.

Originally Posted by LeylaFahada

This is breathtakingly stupid.

And yet it happens all the time, even here on bhuz.

"The movement should come from your (fill in the name of a muscle) rather than from your (fill in the name of a joint or bone)."

* New student walks into class with a bag. States she has never had classes before and is going to start getting professional gigs *next week*

I try to explain the amount of necessary training - when it doesn't sink in. I ask her to bring a costume to next class and after class she can audition to be on the call list for the restaurant where I danced.

She already brought the costume in the bag - complete with nipple flower tassels and ragged single chiffon attached "skirt"

After class, I asked for her music and she said she didn't know *any* middle eastern music. I put on one of my 17 min set cds so she could dance to it.

3 minutes of random flailing later, she said she was done and when would she be scheduled. My response was essentially, "I am sorry, but I can not add you to the schedule at this time or recommend you for any professional gigs. If you would like to audition again, please take classes with one of the local teachers or here with me for at least one year. At that time, if you have progressed enough to be placed on the schedule, you will need an appropriate costume (list retailers for her with price ranges.)"

To top it off, she leaves with this, "You don't want me to succeed. I don't need any classes because I am a natural dancer. You wait - I will take all of your gigs."

Never saw or heard of her again. *shrug* That was probably the one that confused me the most over the years. It was my very first encounter with someone who wanted to be pro without lessons. I had heard of them.....but the reality was something else!

Every summer, just about a month before county fair time, I get a call from a mother (not the daughter, mind you, the mother) who has a daughter in the Miss XXXX County beauty pagent (don't know about other places, but these are big deals in Indiana) who wants me to give her daughter a private lesson (a private lesson, not several private lessons) and teach her daughter to belly dance for the talent portion of the pagent. Umhumm. When I say, it takes much more time to learn this style of dance well enough to perform it, the come-back is always (always) "oh, my daughter will catch right on. She's very talented and has had years of tap (or ballet or modern or jazz or whatever) dance."

The kicker is that 90% of the time, the second question is "and can she borrow one of your costumes?" ..l;, Besides the plain cheekiness of that request, I just turned 62 and am short and overweight. Yep, I'm sure her 5'10" skinny 16 year old wants to wear one of my costumes, even if I were willing to lend it.

On tribal muscle vs Oriental bone...

WTF?

I experienced it backwards, to tell you the truth. My Oriental style teacher was all about muscle movement and my first tribal teacher was the "you just lift your hip" variety with no explanation of *how* that hip gets lifted. I had to use my Oriental training to figure out how the tribal moves were being done!

I'll agree that many tribal teachers *now* teach through the muscles, but most Oriental dancers certainly do too.

As for speechless moments I had a first-time student come in and tell me all about her experience as a merchant marine and how she's seen the dancers on the cruise ships and how it's now her goal to become one after one session of classes because she sets sail again in 2 months. She came to exactly two classes, didn't know her right glute from her left oblique, and was never heard from again. I shudder to think that she may actually be aboard a ship somewhere assaulting the poor cruisers' eyes with her two-lesson rendition of bellydance.

I had a student complain, rather rudely, that she was bored in class because we did a lot of the same moves every week. She couldn't believe that drilling moves, like a shimmy, and doing them over and over was really how you danced. She wanted to do it once and move on.

I politely let her know that if she found me boring, I would be happy to refer her to other teachers, which I did, and she never came to another class anywhere.

The best part? She emailed me a snippy email about "how she didn't mean to offend me" - I wasn't offended, but she told me I was boring, did she think I'd be happy to hear this?!

Originally Posted by ssipes

And yet it happens all the time, even here on bhuz.

"The movement should come from your (fill in the name of a muscle) rather than from your (fill in the name of a joint or bone)."

We have really started TRYING to be more anatomically accurate in how we speak about movement, haven't we? :) I've heard the "skeletal versus muscular" theory of movement origin for a long time. It <sort of> makes sense, but we do need to find a better way to say it.

I once got a whiney email from a student complaining about how unfair it was that her Thursday night class was getting the shaft because of all the snow cancellations & that the Wednesday night class never got interrupted due to weather & that even though I had an 'open door' policy that students from either night could make up classes in the other class & that I was offering make-up classes or pro-rated refunds due to the high number of snow storms it was really unfair of ME to have so many snow storms during the sessions. As if I was in control of 1)the 36" of snow that happened to fall on just about every other thursday that session or 2) the snow cancellation policy of the organization I teach through.

Originally Posted by nayastrance

I once got a whiney email from a student complaining about how unfair it was that her Thursday night class was getting the shaft because of all the snow cancellations & that the Wednesday night class never got interrupted due to weather & that even though I had an 'open door' policy that students from either night could make up classes in the other class & that I was offering make-up classes or pro-rated refunds due to the high number of snow storms it was really unfair of ME to have so many snow storms during the sessions. As if I was in control of 1)the 36" of snow that happened to fall on just about every other thursday that session or 2) the snow cancellation policy of the organization I teach through.

Wow I didn't realize that belly dance teachers were also in cahoots with mother nature.

Originally Posted by ssipes

And yet it happens all the time, even here on bhuz.

"The movement should come from your (fill in the name of a muscle) rather than from your (fill in the name of a joint or bone)."

Yeah, but it's easy to forgive mixing up two body parts. Implying that a group doesn't use the muscles or skeleton should be a pretty obvious blunder! I can't even imagine what that's supposed to mean! ..l;,

Originally Posted by aziyade

We have really started TRYING to be more anatomically accurate in how we speak about movement, haven't we? :) I've heard the "skeletal versus muscular" theory of movement origin for a long time. It <sort of> makes sense, but we do need to find a better way to say it.

I've been using "abdominally/torso generated" vs "limb generated" verbage for quite some time. I consider the vast majority of BD hip movement to originate with the abdominals; some things, like "straight-leg" (aka "Egyptian") shimmies to be more limb-focused, but the torso can still be involved depending upon what variation you want to do.

I teach beginners strictly abdominally/torso generated hip movements, with the exception of the straight-leg shimmy. I don't go anywhere near what I consider to be at least partially limb generated movement until upper intermediate; this policy exists because it's a whole lot easier to push one's hip up than it is to lift that hip and folks really need to get that "muscular" idea firmly embedded in their brains.

Deborah

"I come from Iran (or Lebanon, or Egypt...) so I am a natural, I have been dancing my whole life". Then they proceed to do their own thing the entire session and never notice they are never doing the same thing as anyone else in the class. When I try to adjust something, they say, "I can do this, I used to do this all the time" and they continue to do some strange gyration instead of whatever was being taught.

A student I had not met before turned up in one of my teacher's summer technique classes. At the time I was struggling with a movement I know no name for... it is a hip movement in which the hip drops in front of you, then to the side, and as you go, your weighted foot pivots along the floor so you travel side to side. (What the heck IS that called, anyway?)

Anyway, this student saw me working on this in front of the mirror during the water break and came over to "help" me. She said, "It's much easier to do that move correctly if you keep your foot on the floor." I was puzzled, because as we were taught the move, the working hip's leg is raised up, and said so. "Yeah, but [teacher] teaches this the hard way. Watch," and she demo'd the move... which she almost turned into a grapevine. I was even more confused, and then came the kicker:

"Yeah, you know you're supposed to keep your foot on the floor, because you press on the floor with your foot to make your hip move. That's the right way to do it. That's what my aunt taught me."

Yes... she was "family-trained", and she produced all her hip movements by pressing the ball of her foot into the floor and bending and straightening her knee. Which meant she didn't produce any hip movements when her foot was not on the ground. I had wondered why her dancing looked totally different than everybody else's! What she was doing was fundamentally different from what we were doing.

Luckily break was over quickly and I didn't end up in a long discussion with her. I wondered whether our teacher was going to attempt to correct her approach, and if so how, but she only came to one more class before vanishing.

Is this a common way to produce hip lifts and drops? I was nonplussed.

Originally Posted by tigerb

Is this a common way to produce hip lifts and drops? I was nonplussed.

Yes, and this is sometimes what we called a "skeletal based" move. It's how I first learned a hip lift, and yes, it's mighty limiting.

Originally Posted by mrsnj20

As far as I know, you can't even move your skeleton without using your muscles.

I do hear this one a lot.

Someone recently told me that american dancers use their muscles and egyptian dancers use mostly their skeleton. I don't really buy that for the above mentioned reason....

I actually have a theory as to where this insane concept comes from, and it is that key tribal/American BDers (specifically Carolena and Suhaila) are women now in their 40s with a life-long interest in movement systems, and they like many other similar people got "gymified" in the 80s. The language of the gym is all glutes and obliques and lateral whatsits. So they *teach* in terms of muscles that are referred to by name. Egyptian teachers don't. And some people have gotten the teaching method confused with the actual generation of movement.

I am not a physical specialist and have not studied anatomy, which is why I increasingly avoid references to glutes and abs and so forth because I do not want to get it wrong. Though I do talk about adductors. And certainly I will use bones as reference points (press hip bones forward, pull them back) and talk about the use of legs and feet to add texture, but when it comes to the torso I am all about teaching how it *feels* and where the feeling occurs rather than saying "now isolate your psoas".

Originally Posted by aziyade

Yes, and this is sometimes what we called a "skeletal based" move. It's how I first learned a hip lift, and yes, it's mighty limiting.

Yep, I call it a "leg driven" rather than a "core driven" hip lift. The dead giveaway is if the heel is going up and down - if so, they are driving the movement by pushing up and lowering the hip with their foot, as opposed to pulling the hip up with the oblique and releasing to a controlled neutral position. I demonstrate both was in class, indicating that the goal (some students to not have the oblique strength or body awareness to do it from the core right off the bat) is to do it without pushing up with the leg/foot.

I took a workshop with Shakira of Columbus a few years back. She's Alexandrian (sp?) technique and does a great job of breaking anatomy down. She had everyone do the 'lift one foot and then do a hip lift' thing, and yet again I was different from everyone else. And after 20 years of dancing/teaching/performing I got an explanation.

The majority of people instinctively use the non-weighted hip. That is, with your weight entirely on your right foot, you will automatically lift the left hip. About 10% of us (includes me! turns out) will lift the left foot, and then lift/drop and so forth the right. We are the weighted people.

Neither is right/wrong. And a good dancer with versatility will learn to use both. Both it can be discouraging to a newbie to whom everything feels backwards. (Im also left handed. May explain why I prefer solos!)

Originally Posted by aziyade

3. I don't like this class because I don't want to learn how to make a choreography or learn how to improvise. I just want to learn how to DANCE.
Again, speechless. Maybe I have really bad comprehension, but WTH?

Well, here's my take on this one. Perhaps it's not what the particular person meant, but it could make sense. It's possible for a person to just want to learn how to perform other people's choreographies without having a desire to create them or improvise. Much in the same way that a singer doesn't necessarily have to be a lyricist or composer, for example. I'm taking the "how to MAKE" a choreography as the key phrase there -- it would be different if it had said "how to DO a choreography."

Originally Posted by KDizzle

Wow I didn't realize that belly dance teachers were also in cahoots with mother nature.

Well, recall that we are worshipping the goddess..so we have an "in".

I had a student that during class would work on different stuff/moves than the class....so if we were doing some moves or isolation that she felt she knew already or was an expert at(wink, wink) she wouldn't do them and would start doing something else that she wanted to work on or from a previous class........very very distracting. The funny thing was she couldn't do the moves she thought she already had down and needed the drilling of said moves.......I would look over and the whole class would be following me in the mirror in unison and then there would be this oddball in the back doing her own thing...it was totally weird.