Caller and teacher notes

Notes for the person running the evening: what to plan, what to track, and what to do about the calls that keep failing.

Planning an evening

Plan backwards from the get-out. You want a figure that finishes cleanly, built from calls the class can already dance, so decide what that is first and build the evening towards it.

A ninety-minute evening works best when you alternate dancing and teaching, and when the new material sits in the middle rather than at the end. The shape suggested in Teaching a class — a warm-up of known calls, the new work, a break, then a full tip — is worth following until you have a reason not to.

Two rules are worth more than any plan:

• Never teach past the point where the class stops improving. If the call is not landing after fifteen minutes, park it and bring it back next week. A call taught twice badly is worse than a call taught once properly.
• Write down what you taught. Memory of a class is unreliable after a fortnight, and a class that repeats a call it did three weeks ago is a class that loses confidence.

Tracking what a class knows

Keep a list of the units a group has been taught, in order, and mark each one:

The jump from taught to danced is the one that matters, and the jump from danced to secure is the one teachers most often skip. Building on a call that has only ever been walked is building on sand.

This is where a written class record earns its place. For each evening, note which calls were introduced, which were walked, and which were danced to music — three columns, and the third one is the only one that counts. Keep it beside the music and the next class plans itself. You do not need to invent a system: the three words above are the whole of it.

Revising calls that keep failing

Some calls fail for weeks. When one does, the fault is usually one of four things:

1. The class never learned the shape it starts from. If dancers cannot picture the formation, no amount of repetition will help. Go back and dance the formation itself.
2. The handhold is wrong. Beginner errors are hands far more often than feet. Watch the hands on the first beat of the call, not the last.
3. It was taught too late in an evening. Calls taught when people are tired are learned badly. Teach it again, earlier, in a fresh evening.
4. It only ever appears in one figure. Dancers learn calls by meeting them in different places. Put the failing call into three different drills and let them meet it cold.

When you revise, revise one thing. Take the call back to its starting formation, walk it without music, then dance it in a short figure, then put it back in the tip it came from. If it still fails, stop teaching it that term and use the calls that work.

Building a tip the class can dance

A tip is only as good as the calls in it. For a beginner class, a tip should use:

• calls the class has danced, not merely met;
• no more than one call from the most recent evening;
• a short opener, a figure, a break, and the standard get-out.

The get-out — Allemande Left, Right and Left Grand, Promenade Home — should be the same every week until it is automatic. It is the one piece of a tip that dancers should never have to think about.

Drills has a graded set you can lift figures from, and How to practise is what to hand a dancer who asks what they can do between classes.

Keeping the record honest

If the record says a call is danced and the square cannot dance it, the record is wrong. Fix it at the end of the evening, while you can still remember which call it was. A teaching record that has drifted from the class is worse than no record at all, because it will be trusted.