Hi everybody, Fran here with your Tango Tip of the Week. When you go to a Tango class, you almost certainly have the expectation -- or at least the hope -- that you're going to actually learn something by the end of the lesson. If you're like most students, you evaluate the effectiveness of any given session by the amount of information you receive. A common response to a lesson that you feel has gone well might be something like, "Boy, I really picked up a lot of material today; what a great class!"

Quantity is your ultimate measure of success.

As long as I've been teaching dance, the majority of my students have judged my value -- and the value of any teacher for that matter -- by this singular criterion: An easily definable end result (such as the number of steps the students have "learned" that day) is good; a narrow concentration on what students consider to be minutiae is not so good.

Dance schools have long recognized that the more information you present to a class during any given session, the higher they will perceive its value. This means they'll keep coming back for more, and the money will continue flowing in the desired direction. From the standpoint of marketing, therefore, the idea that "more is better" is a long-accepted and reliable strategy. The difficulty is that as a basis for actual learning, it doesn't work.

Real learning is a very chaotic affair. In the first place, it isn't linear: e.g., I show you a side step; you try it a couple of times; okay, you've got it; it's in the system now and forever; let's move on.

Most of us would really like learning to be just like that -- linear, one to one, stimulus/response; let's get this show on the road. Unfortunately, the learning process just isn't like that. Instead, I show you a side step; you lurch to the side; you lose your balance; you practically knock your partner to the floor; your feet don't come together appropriately; you make an automatic weight change to the other foot; okay we've got a lot of work to do. You come back next week, and what has happened? You've forgotten everything. Okay, let's start over. What's a side step?

Get the idea? The real, practical, let's-face-it learning process is very complex. If you've taken more than a single dance class in your life, you know this by now. Of course, you probably think it's all your own fault. If you'd paid more attention during the session, if you were better at learning, if you had better partners, if, if, if ....

No, my friend, none of that is true. The learning process is the problem, not you. If you really want to learn, let's say, a dance figure, the show-and-tell fantasy of YouTube is not -- is not, is not -- going to give you the results you're after. What you need is to make a serious commitment to the weird, circuitous -- sometimes downright scary -- learning process. Learn the figure today -- sort of, anyway -- forget half of it overnight; relearn it tomorrow; gain a little insight along the way; decide your insight was all wrong; start over, etc., etc., etc. Eventually (a loaded word that can mean next week or ten years from now), the figure meanders into your working, on-the-dance-floor vocabulary. And even then, you're finding out new things about that figure every single time you bring it out for display during a milonga or practica.

If you accept all this, you will eventually start becoming a real student of Tango. You will join those of us who have become acutely aware from being in the trenches everyday that quantity has nothing to do with learning. It's what you're doing right now in this finite moment that counts. And that side step we were talking about earlier is a crucial element of dance vocabulary that you're constantly trying to make more and more perfect very time you attempt to do it.

Do you still want to learn Tango? Start now, and get yourself on the right path. We need you on the dance floor.

The following folks helped set up, break down and clean up before and after the milonga. Without them, there would be no Firehouse Tango.

• Kerry Stoldt - Mango/Black Bean Salsa
  

• Bill Kennick
  
• Mary Pagano
  
• George Ngo
• Christine Russo
• Bill Krukovsky
  
• Walter Milani
• Meryl Shapiro
• Jesse & Cathy
  
• Bob Brillo
• June Stahl
  
• Diane Langmuir