Jig I Cannot

Elementary school teachers are often Renaissance-persons; having to be able to teach every subject area with some level of competency at some time in their careers. Lots of background knowledge and wide interests are essential. Despite our best efforts at knowing a little bit about everything, no one can really teach it all well. My area of weakness is dance.

Most of the arts are easy; I am a music major, almost theatre minor (short one course) with an very artsy-fartsy family background. But I have never taken an ounce of dance. I like to dance; Friday nights at Don Cherry's in Hamilton was a weekly staple of my university social life. My dorm mates and I took to the dance floor at nine and left at last call. We were all having too much fun to drink much.

But, according to the Ontario curriculum, that isn't quite what I am expected to teach my students.

So, with no dance background, and no teacher guides or textbooks, I took a leap; our first activity in our dance unit is going to be Line Dancing. And since I have one and a half left feet, I went hunting on the Web for some guidance. I found this, which is the first of a series of really well done dance steps tutorials. BINGO! Put together with an example of Line Dancing from an old GAP commercial (also courtesy of the fab Web) as the hook/intro and we had the start of our first lesson.

I was a bit unsure until we started. We laughed so hard and had so much fun. I think we may include dance twice a week.