After reading the "so quiet here" thread i started to think about what i know about finding a good tango teacher, and putting together my ideas on that topic.
The main problem is that as a beginner we obviously have no way to decide if a teacher is a good or a bad teacher, and additionally it is quite difficult to get good recommendations from other people - different people have different learning styles, and different goals in their tango dancing, and somebody who is a good teacher for one person might be a bad teacher for somebody else. Additionally people are in general too polite to make strong statements about other people in the relative small tango communities - especially as it almost for sure will get back to the other teachers. And people who are willing to make strong statements throw up a completely different set of red flags.
One of the best bases for a decision would be to see ones teacher dance at a milonga. How do they look when they dance "in the wild"? Do they dance with other people than their partner? Do they match the overall flow of the dancefloor? Do the people around them look comfortable?
The next thing to check out are other students of the teacher. No matter how bad somebody might be as a dancer and teacher, they are still much better than a beginner, and even bad dancers can look amazing when dancing with their partner/people they have trained themselves, to music they chose themselves, at a milonga that they chose themselves. Other students might be a better measure to figure out what we can expect to look like after 1 year, or 2 years with that teacher. In my experience many teachers who do group classess are willing to let beginners/prospective students watch their advanced classes, and that is often a better view of what their teaching looks like than the beginners classes.
What should one learn in the beginners class?
This is quite subjective, and there are no real rules - different teachers have different approaches, and different students have different preferences.
But there is one thing that i personally feel should be part of every beginners series (i am assuming something like a 8 week course) - this is heavily biased by my perspective of tango as a social dance that has its purest (and maybe only) expression at the milonga - other people who see tango more as a performance art would probably look for different things:
The line of dance: While practicing "figures" can be stationary, there should be some time spent in class on using the "figures" while moving around the room in the line of dance. This includes some basic navigational tools on how to deal with being stuck behind somebody and how to turn corners.
Everything else - figures, basic or no, embrace, whatever is (somewhat) negotiable, but if you are not learning tango as a travelling dance it will not work at a milonga.
That is the real test of a beginners class - one should be able to go to any milonga and survive on the dance floor and have some fun. If the teachers recommend against going to milongas, or push going only to their milonga that is a bit of a warning sign, but on the other hand they have the control over their milonga, and are able to make it beginner friendly and make sure that beginners feel welcomed, so it is not neccessarily a bad sign.
Taking beginner classes from different teachers is potentially a good idea, but requires a bit of discipline. Teachers are very, very different from each other, and what one has learned from one teacher might not be directly applicable to what another teacher teaches. Like in writing classes - some start off with writing haiku, some start off with writing instructions for a toaster - in the long run things will fall into place in the big pattern that is "good writing", but in the short run it is quite incompatible. So to profit from a new class with a new teacher it is essential to be willing to actually start from scratch in the way that the teacher asks us to.
This is also equally important for taking workshops - only by accepting and agreeing with the framework the teacher is teaching from is it possible to learn from them. Surprisingly many intermediate students have difficulties with that, and end up quite frustrated because of it. During a workshop one has to do his best to dance in the teachers style and framwork - adapting the ideas (if possible) to ones own style/other styles is self study. In privates one can ask about how to adapt these ideas to other things (though i think it would probably not be the best use of ones time), but that has no place in workshops/group classes.
Gssh
The main problem is that as a beginner we obviously have no way to decide if a teacher is a good or a bad teacher, and additionally it is quite difficult to get good recommendations from other people - different people have different learning styles, and different goals in their tango dancing, and somebody who is a good teacher for one person might be a bad teacher for somebody else. Additionally people are in general too polite to make strong statements about other people in the relative small tango communities - especially as it almost for sure will get back to the other teachers. And people who are willing to make strong statements throw up a completely different set of red flags.
One of the best bases for a decision would be to see ones teacher dance at a milonga. How do they look when they dance "in the wild"? Do they dance with other people than their partner? Do they match the overall flow of the dancefloor? Do the people around them look comfortable?
The next thing to check out are other students of the teacher. No matter how bad somebody might be as a dancer and teacher, they are still much better than a beginner, and even bad dancers can look amazing when dancing with their partner/people they have trained themselves, to music they chose themselves, at a milonga that they chose themselves. Other students might be a better measure to figure out what we can expect to look like after 1 year, or 2 years with that teacher. In my experience many teachers who do group classess are willing to let beginners/prospective students watch their advanced classes, and that is often a better view of what their teaching looks like than the beginners classes.
What should one learn in the beginners class?
This is quite subjective, and there are no real rules - different teachers have different approaches, and different students have different preferences.
But there is one thing that i personally feel should be part of every beginners series (i am assuming something like a 8 week course) - this is heavily biased by my perspective of tango as a social dance that has its purest (and maybe only) expression at the milonga - other people who see tango more as a performance art would probably look for different things:
The line of dance: While practicing "figures" can be stationary, there should be some time spent in class on using the "figures" while moving around the room in the line of dance. This includes some basic navigational tools on how to deal with being stuck behind somebody and how to turn corners.
Everything else - figures, basic or no, embrace, whatever is (somewhat) negotiable, but if you are not learning tango as a travelling dance it will not work at a milonga.
That is the real test of a beginners class - one should be able to go to any milonga and survive on the dance floor and have some fun. If the teachers recommend against going to milongas, or push going only to their milonga that is a bit of a warning sign, but on the other hand they have the control over their milonga, and are able to make it beginner friendly and make sure that beginners feel welcomed, so it is not neccessarily a bad sign.
Taking beginner classes from different teachers is potentially a good idea, but requires a bit of discipline. Teachers are very, very different from each other, and what one has learned from one teacher might not be directly applicable to what another teacher teaches. Like in writing classes - some start off with writing haiku, some start off with writing instructions for a toaster - in the long run things will fall into place in the big pattern that is "good writing", but in the short run it is quite incompatible. So to profit from a new class with a new teacher it is essential to be willing to actually start from scratch in the way that the teacher asks us to.
This is also equally important for taking workshops - only by accepting and agreeing with the framework the teacher is teaching from is it possible to learn from them. Surprisingly many intermediate students have difficulties with that, and end up quite frustrated because of it. During a workshop one has to do his best to dance in the teachers style and framwork - adapting the ideas (if possible) to ones own style/other styles is self study. In privates one can ask about how to adapt these ideas to other things (though i think it would probably not be the best use of ones time), but that has no place in workshops/group classes.
Gssh
