The answer as a teacher is surely to educate them.
If you respect the tango tradition and wish to increase/improve
the dancing pool then teach what will do that. Regrettably tango
is going the way of ballroom dancing with standardisation of hold
(not even an embrace really) and homogenisation
of steps, moves and patterns (VU).
My own experience of beginner classes is that the group will be too mixed in their knowledge/ignorance of social tango and in their expectations of what the class will deliver for the noble attempt at 'education' to stand any real chance of success.
An issue here for those of us that work in the dance industry (rather than in the tango community) is that many of the students that gravitate towards us with an interest in AT do so with preconceptions based on their experience, most probably of Ballroom or other standardised partner dances. What brought them through the door wasn't an interest in social tango (and it is obvious from what they say that they know nothing at all about the dance and its baggage), but that they watched Vincent Simone & Flavia Cacace on Strictly Come Dancing and enjoyed their demonstration Show Tangos. They will tolerate two or three weeks of 'basic steps', but will be impatient if they're not dancing ganchos by week three, and are we going to do any lifts?
Such raw material is quite challenging, but 'education' is not what they are going to pay for, but I still have studio hire to cover, and I have to eat. If they have a 'routine' by the end of 6 weeks, so that when they go to one of their general social dances and the DJ puts on one or perhaps two tango songs during the evening, they will be able to get up, and having wound the key fully, dance. If you happen to bump into them at a dance, years later, and the DJ puts on a tango song, they will still be dancing exactly the same 'routine', unless in the meantime they have invested further time and effort going to a teacher, who has taught them a 'flashier' routine. There's nothing I can do that will change them, and I'd be wasting my time even trying.
Social tango isn't the steps or moves or the Basic8 (8CB).
It's the feeling of movement in the embrace to the music
so teach that. One hour (or even less) is enough to get
new students doing so, then encourage them to listen
to the music and practice. Teaching of posture, connection
and all the possibilities will have the correct context -
that of dancing the music.
I know it isn't, but my thoughts are to try and do both simultaneously: to introduce a small basic vocabulary of tango actions, in a walking to music context, but with those actions 'standardised' into the figures which nearly 100% of tango dancers would recognise, even if they would prefer to say that their dancing of, say, a back ocho from a sidestep in cross system, before walking out to a follower's cruzada, wasn't a 'figure' but something that they had spontaneously 'improvised' (along with half the other people in the room, by some strange coincidence).
My objective would be to get my students able to dance simply around the room, linking these actions by walking, weight changes and pauses (with the beginnings of musicality in their execution). That will be enough for some, and they will never return to a higher level class, but for those that do, I would want to deconstruct the 'standardised' figures as quickly as possible, to start builidng improvisatory competence using the same basic elements (but combined in lots of new non-standardised ways), and adding additional elements, so that their vocabulary grew in pace with their ability to speak the language of tango.
Teachers concentrate too much on teaching and not on
the learning of their students.
I'm not sure that I know what you mean, but lots of people who can 'do' something to a reasonable standard believe that it is self-evident that they (or anyone else) could 'teach' it as well, and this is just not so. Teaching is a skill, and there is a fundamental requirement that you can address the whole ability range of your group of students, and that you can offer material that appeals to the whole range of learning styles. It makes me very cross (and this is not directed at
you) to be 'denounced' when I say that I teach dancing. Apparently I might as well be a vending machine, dispensing dancing (and robotic dancing by numbers, too). Such an approach has nothing to do with the work of a trained, skilled and experienced teacher, and the attempts of some hobby dancers (and several tango teachers whom I have observed) to
teach is laughable.
The more I dance tango,
the more I realise just how misguided (I say this because
I do feel that their intentions were genuine) my teachers
were and now my search would be for a method to get
people simply dancing as soon as possible.
We cannot tranship the old BsAs way, we don't have the
culture nor tango infrastructure for that. And as a result
we need teachers and their motivation to spread the word.
Regrettably that necessary (?) commercialisation is in itself
a big danger to a tango of the senses.
Your post quoted above encapsulates that.
But surely from being on here and what you've written
you could be different. You know it's different to ballroom
so attempt to teach it differently if teaching is what you intend
to do. Maybe don't think of it as teaching but coaching
or even coaxing!
I think your expectations of a tango teacher with a mixed beginners class is unrealistic. The wider responsibility to introduce wannabe tango dancers to the tango community has to be shared by the tango community. The teacher has a role, but it's not a one-man-responsibility. I don't have a duty to 'deliver' fully rounded tango dancers to the next milonga, taking their place, quietly with their peers, wearing their shiny new Comme Il Faut shoes, and joining in the cabeceo and being models of good floorcraft and ambassadors for the tango way. Frankly, if the tango community (or a vocal minority of the tango community) were more welcoming of newcomers, and not so up-themselves, they might notice that they haven't used the cabeceo all night, and when they're on the floor they are flailing about, in all directions, and are an absolute nuisance to the beginners trying to move steadily around the line of dance in this 'walking with embelishments' dance they have just spent good money learning.
