What do you parents think of mixed proficiency (teens with little kids) when there is a lack of partner options? I felt like part of the benefit of this as a hobby for a child would be learning the skills needed to work in a partnership. Still there a bit I’m sure, but maybe less?
Because of the size differential between teens, who are basically thin adults, and little kids, who are little, this kind of mixed proficiency tends to end up working just like children's pro-am assuming the teen is the higher proficiency. (I have no idea how this would work if the little kid were the higher proficiency, although the thought is amusing.)
For newcomers and maybe lower level Latin, it can work, if the hold is a fingertip to fingertip hold instead of trying for a "real" hold. Once the kid gets beyond complete beginner, this is no longer the best solution.
In Standard, it works less well, because the adult size partner's natural body contact point is considerably off from the kid's ideal contact point. Often it develops bad habits as the kid starts sticking his or her behind out to avoid collisions with the adult's thighs. Not ideal for partnering.
I do know one instructor who is able to adjust her contact point to the ideal height for the boy, and that works fine for the boy. I'm not sure if this can work as well for an adult male instructor with a girl student, or even in the general case for female instructors. I also know one local pro who is a good height match for typical juniors - though not juveniles - which she uses to her advantage when teaching.
An adult male instructor can develop good Standard movement in a girl student by foregoing body contact and leading through the frame. The instructor has to make major adjustments to how he leads, because it needs to be correct for the girl, not for him, but I've seen at least one male instructor who was able to do this. However, while this can develop the girl's skills in terms of body flight, movement quality, and knowledge of the material, it is not as good for partnering skills; the girl develops very specific and slightly idiosyncratic patterns of movement, and is going to expect the boy to adjust to her when she gets a partner who is matched in height or age, rather than doing her part in the adjustment. If the boy she ultimately ends up with has a strong Eggleton philosophy for lead and follow - "first you lead the lady, then you follow what she does" - this can work, but this isn't the only lead and follow philosophy that is taught. It also requires a boy who has sufficiently good body flight and movement quality to match the girl.
What I think works better is to use mixed proficiency to match up little kids who are about the right size for each other, but at different proficiency levels. Since it's usually girls who are in excess, this means finding a more proficient boy who is still little. The owner of one of the local kids' studios has two sons; this has worked well for her though the boys are now getting too tall to dance comfortably with little kids.
13 year old partnered a girl in this situation about a year ago - he was 12 then, and to be honest, he's still little kid sized. In the studio group picture, some of the couples are smiling and some are not, presumably based on how well they did in the competition. The girl 13 year old partnered is absolutely beaming like the cat who got the canary! So presumably it was a good experience for her.
That said, she hasn't asked to do it again, or at least the studio hasn't arranged for it again. In this case, I think the studio was hoping that 13 year old would take this girl as his regular partner, despite the proficiency difference, and possibly that might have been what the girl thought was happening. So I'd say studios and coaches need to make clear what the situation is with mixed proficiency competitions to avoid raising unrealistic expectations.
Of course, honesty on the part of the coach won't necessarily guarantee a good result, either. There's another situation at another of the kids' studios that I've heard about through gossip from various parents, siblings, and random preteens. From my perspective, this started when the girl who had recently dumped 10 year old as a partner was seen taking a lesson from an eligible boy of the right age and height for her. While I obviously wasn't favorably disposed to this girl, I could look at the lesson objectively, and to me they looked like a good match. In my opinion, she was slightly better than he was, but that's to be expected in a random kids' partnership.
It turned out that the boy's family thought he was helping out a potential mixed amateur competitor that they thought was not nearly as good as he was, perhaps because he was learning gold material and she only knew bronze material. The coach in this case was completely honest: she was looking at it as a good potential primary partnership. So there was potential for miscommunication there that got headed off. However, there's no established partnership yet and as far as I know they have not competed mixed amateur.
Now, this boy does apparently have other choices. There is another girl who in my opinion is slightly better than 10 year old's former partner but is a slightly worse physical match for this boy, who is apparently hoping for a partnership with the same boy and considers 10 year old's former partner to be her primary rival. She might have considered 10 year old to be her "safety partner", as we'd previously inquired with the studio as to her availability, and she expressed surprise that 10 year old had taken on a beginner as his partner. But hey, nobody ever responded to our inquiry, so we went with who we knew to be available, though to be fair the lack of response was probably more the studio's or her parents' fault than hers.
The studio 10 year old did find his new partner at has a coach with a harshly realistic policy: she has flat out stated to the students at her studio that "the best girls will be matched up with the boys for partners, best with the best and so on down the line." This might be why all of the boys at her studio have partners, though there's a question regarding why the bottom two thirds of the girls stick around - although I guess the studio does also have pro-am available. This is the same coach who has said, regarding practice, "it's not enough to be in the studio practicing every day, you also need to stay for rounds." Perhaps unsurprisingly, her couples tend to do well. While 10 year old was looking for a partner, she told us to tell her every time we came in whether and what tryouts the studio owner had arranged, since he was the one with the contact information for the girls' families. So that may be a reason why 10 year old ended up finding his partner there rather than another studio.
There might be some lessons here about forming kids' partnerships. Boys shouldn't get hung up on syllabus levels; one can get carried to a higher proficiency level than one's technique justifies by amateur, mixed amateur, or pro-am partners. Girls may have to accept that having a partner at all is a good thing, and while one might get lucky with a partner who is as good as or better than the girl is, it can't be expected. And coaches, perhaps, should be proactive about forming partnerships promptly - we've been lucky to have a couple of coaches who have done this.
Anyway, sorry about the prolonged tangent. I think mixed proficiency amateur can work, but I think it works better with partners of sufficiently matched size that if proficiency wasn't an issue, they could be regular partners. That's still quite a broad range, just not broad enough to accommodate the average high schooler dancing with the average grade schooler.
