How to Learn
"The Fred Astaire Way to better Dancing"
There are two basic ingredients in learning any subject - DESIRE and MOMENTUM. If any student has a real desire to learn and takes lessons with regularity, he can master any skill. This pattren of learning applies to dancing as well as to any other art or game.
The secret of a successful school is what is learned by the students. We, as teachers, realize that it is more important to teach the STUDENT than to teach the LESSON. It's not what is taught that matters, but what is learned.
The New Method For Reaching Our Goal
In order to give our students "the feeling of dancing" we have developed a fabulous system of guiding each course.
First, each course is supervised by the Dance Director. Private progress checks are given regularly on every course in the school. This is a very welcome form of guidance to our professional teachers. Like medical doctors in consultation, our staff contributes many opinions on each student.
Another contributing factor to the greatsuccess of our new method is our exchange-lesson policy. This means each student has a key teacher who plans and controls the course. But the key teacher also arranges for each student to book exchange- lessons with other teachers so that all of our studnets learn to dance with many partners.
The most important single part of our method of teaching dancing instead of steps is our inter-relation of dances. By inter-relation we mean that each dance contributes to the students pver-all ability to master all dances. For instance, the Cuban feeling of the Rumba is also expressed in the Mambo, Merengue and Cha-Cha. Therefore all of the time spent learning the Cha-Cha improves the dancing or the Rumba, Merengue and Mambo.
System of Instruction