classydancer
Member
I agree! Teachers are expensive; if yours watches you outside of paid time, take advantage :-D.
I'm still self-conscious sometimes, but I have to get over myself in order to improve. One of my coaches said her teacher had hooks outside the studio and one of them was named, "ego." He told all of his students to leave their egos outside (whether that took the form of too much or too little confidence), because it gets in the way of learning.
Another interesting side to this is culture. My partner grew up in communist Soviet Union, where he was taught to endure criticism often and publicly. In that society, people were taught to attack ideas with little regard for the person (in schools, this would be in front of a classroom of students). The individual wasn't important, the idea/task (for the good of the country) was...so kids had to develop thick skin and not take criticism personally. A funny example: when my partner first came to the US as a graduate student, he was in a class where the teacher couldn't finish a math problem. Without missing a beat, he went up and finished it for him, which was completely normal back home. He "attacked" the idea without thinking about how it would make the teacher look, lol. So he is pretty good at taking and giving criticism, and is rarely self-conscious or embarrassed. While this quality has made our practices challenging sometimes, it is something I admire and strive to adopt.