People have different goals and ideas and they're dancing. Sometimes is to emulate others to their benefit or their downfall. They are often people make mistakes on their way to learning what is best for them individually. I think a good teacher let students make mistakes that gives them enough information to understand for themselves. I'm trying to follow some of the things you're saying but I've also been sick and trying to work too!
Sorry you're not feeling well, and hope you recover quickly.
No rush at all on the technique stuff, as learning/sharing is a timeless thing.
Just go over all the items at your leisure. In order to communicate what
I'd like to share, I'm pretty sure item-by-item interactive discussion is
the only way, because there is a train of thought that needs to be conveyed.
Single blurbs of sentences just won't be useful. It's like the old adage of
the 3 blind men trying to describe an elephant by touch, each only having
tactile contact with a small part of the animal.
Learning skills is a jigsaw puzzle, but unfortunately with lots of pieces mixed
in from other puzzles, which needs to be discarded. This excess of information
(which is ridiculously aided by technology) just obfuscates the ability to make
good/great decisions/choices.
I used to think that one can learn as much from mistakes as from "successes"
until I had a recent discussion with a friend about the process of learning and
becoming a true expert (not the tons of pseudo-experts who talk better
game than can ever deliver). My friend claimed that all greats in their fields
excel at what they do (based on true meritocracy rather than politics), as
compared to the next strata of excellent-but-not-great experts (all these
people having great innate talent/abilities), primarily because the greats had
superior mentorship. IOW, people who are great at what they do actually
didn't have to spend nearly the same amount of time/effort learning from
mistakes, and were guided by knowledgeable people from the onset, having
much more head-start than the next person (in the next strata).
Which leads to the thing I've always found screwy...
When I first started dancing, there was this mindset where Standard
dancers would revel in the idea that they spent 6+ years and hundreds
of thousands of dollars to perfect their Foxtrot Feather, learning from
some world-reknowned coaches (the ancients). Which made
me very befuddled, since we're talking one single figure for heaven
sakes.
Now that I'm far more secure in my understanding of movement
and the learning process, having gone through tons of mistakes and
a few "successes" (at least as applied to _my_ goals), my take on
this (the somewhat elitist attitude) is that it's unfortunate that those
Standard dancers couldn't get better coaching. (Of course, racking
up the $$$ may be a consideration)
While it may take years and decades to figure out things by oneself,
proper/good mentorship is supposed to cut it down to nil, since
the mentor supposedly already suffered through the learning
process already.
But, the world has far more mis-information than useful information.
