The tasters went really well! We had a good turnout -- about 19 people I think. A few others have said they'll come next week, and some can't come to tasters but have said they'll come to class, so we already have enough people to make the society feasible (yay!). We opened with a brief demo (to Reel Around The Sun) and an explanation of Irish dance, then did a warmup, and then split into two groups. I was teaching the absolute beginners, and H taught those with some dance experience (some had done Irish, some completely different types). Over the course of an hour and a half I taught them skips, cuts, and jumps, with varying degrees of success. Some picked it up pretty rapidly, while others struggled more, but even for those there was a substantial improvement by the end of the class. Quite a few people said they were definitely going to come back, and seemed really enthusiastic, which I took as a sign that I'm not a terrible teacher. However: I am completely and utterly exhausted. Every muscle in my body hurts. It turns out that dancing slowly is harder than dancing fast, and repeating the same steps over and over again for 90 mins (demonstrating again and again and correcting 11 different kinds of mistakes) is super tiring. Plus, it's really hard to do jumps slowly. I have done about a thousand jumps today. My hips are planning a mutiny. Also, while I did enjoy teaching the beginners and found it fairly rewarding, my ultimate goal with the society is still to learn for myself and to improve. The two aren't incompatible: I could teach a beginner's class and then go to another class as a student, provided I hadn't collapsed in a heap. But I think I may end up taking on more of a teacher role than a student one, especially this term. Maybe some of our more advanced dancers will be able to take over and help the beginners? We'll have to see. And of course, once some of them pick it up, they can help each other more, so I won't have to demonstrate so continuously. In the meantime I fear I'll be completely unable to get out of bed tomorrow, and I have a class at 10am, so that's going to be interesting. I've stretched and had a shower and stuff, but I'm still just a ball of pain. How do teachers DO this? Also, minor victory: plucked up the courage to tell people my pronouns when introducing myself (as Finn, bc frankly it's weird to go by Miriam in a dance context when everyone here and at my dance school at home calls me Finn), so I don't have to worry about coming out to them at a later stage. Wahey.
