Learning and teaching have always fascinated me and especially finding what it is the difference that makes the difference between the good and the best teachers and students alike.
Teaching is in its own right a very intricate task and a successful teacher has mastery of his or her students, their states of body and mind, and of course the material to be presented. Teaching tango is a particularly challenging subject to teach and most people who teach tango do so because they are passionate about it and not because they are in the “business of teaching”.
Granted, whether you are being taught by a professional teacher or a hobbyist, it is useful for us, as students, to know what we need to know in order to learn effectively. This way, we are able to be aware of what the teacher is providing us with and whether there is anything missing in order for us to learn.
If I asked you to stand straight at one spot on the floor and then to walk to another spot on the floor, in a straight line, you would “just do it”. It’s a simple enough task that you’ve done many times before and because it is so simple and common, there are three “invisible” components:
Simple and kind of obvious, right?
But, what happens when you’re being taught a more complex technique such as a gencho or a volcada, which in most probability you have never done before? How can the above components help us?
The three components I listed above are the active ingredients of executing any action, goal or outcome, successfully. First of all, we need to know where we are starting from and “what is true” at this position. Secondly, we need to “begin with the end in mind”: what is it that we’re trying to achieve, specifically? Once we can hold these two positions (beginning and end) in mind, we can ask the question of “how” and figure out different ways to get there. Finally, we need to know how we will know when we get there so we can stop and I will explain how this especially important for tango and complex techniques, next.
Tango is very much a game of this kind of awareness.
Typically, the leader will lead a movement and it is important for him to know whether this movement is possible from the current position, how to execute it and most importantly whether he has been successful in leading it. It is the most important part of the “lead” because it will lead the follower into a new position that the next movement will begin from. If the lead was not successful for whatever reason and this position is not the one the leader anticipated while he thinks it is, the results of the next movement can be disastrous. In other words, the leader needs to know what he wants and whether he got it or not after a lead.
For the follower things are slightly different. Once she is lead and given a signal, she needs to know what kind of movement will this signal have her body do, and follow it. By the same token, during learning, it is necessary for her to know what this signal is.
So far, so good.
How do we use this in a classroom?
Simple.
At every point in time during a class, you should hold those three items in your mind: the start, the end and how to get there and how to know when you got there. Some of the time it may be obvious but practice this whether it is a simple exercise or a complex movement or step: go through this mental list and tick the ones that you know. If you are missing any, ask the teacher. If what he or she says does not make sense as words, ask to practice it with them so that they can adjust your body accordingly.
Be gentle in the way you ask you might step on the protruding egos of some teachers.
Also, If you are taught a complex sequence of movements, it will be useful to break it down in terms of these three components and the neat thing about this is that the ending point of each movement will be the beginning point of the next and the two structures will link effortlessly: if you know how to know when you get there on each movement, you will also know how you need to start on the next movement.
Practicing this while you learn will prove to be, as I will discuss in later articles, even more fruitful that it may be apparent at first. Not only will you know exactly what you need to do and how to go about it in the classroom, but you will also be able to use this awareness to generalize what you’ve learnt and be able to create and improvise new movements that use the same pattern! More on that, next time.